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I guess this gets back to the question of whether this is a temporary crisis like the 70s, or the beginning of the end of abundant oil. And, I can't answer that question either. Sounds good. It was an interesting discussion, I learned from it and I appreciate your taking the time. Martin

Actually I read the Financial Times and the Economist. I wonder where that puts me in the culture wars ideological spectrum. Can I borrow your crib sheet? Martin

Reducto ad absurdum, all taxes should be replaced by markets for social services applied to the transactions that invoke the externality. For example, when a child is born the parents would have to bid on an insurance package that would pay for their child's incarceration should they turn out to...

I tried to roll over my QM/QG position today. I was able to close the August contracts but I got an error message opening the September contract. I just talked to an IB rep. He made some excuse about a systems problem of some sort. He said that the September NYMEX contracts would be tradable by...

We were talking about taxation. Do you consider consumption taxes to be price fixing? I don't. FWIW I agree that government price fixing (which many Asian countries do with distillate prices) is almost always a bad idea. Taxes are always distortionary and inefficient, granted, but not nearly...

1% of value? Shit, I'm renting at 0.28% of value. I agree, rents are completely out of whack. Martin

<i>hmmm.... they say oil is an inelastic good.....</i> Very inelastic in the short run, but quite elastic in the long run. People don't stop driving to work, but they buy more fuel efficient cars, conserve energy at home, manufacturing gets more efficient, nuclear power plants get built...

Sorry EQ... I thought you meant the DVI 1.0 specs. I wasn't paying enough attention. It's astonishing to see a new card today which can't do at least 1600x1200 digitally over DVI. Martin

Kubilai - sorry, I didn't notice your response to my post. Here's my thoughts. Yes. I couldn't agree more. I agree. However, the way you "somehow" attach monetary value to a shared resource is through regulation of markets. You can't force a free market to price in an externality without...

Modern video cards support much higher resolutions, at least 1600x1200, over a single DVI link. It isn't part of the standard, but as long as the TDMS tranceiver has enough bandwidth it does work. Not all Matrox cards support 1920x1200, although newer NVidia and ATI cards generally do...

Look, I'd be the first to agree that oil futures have gotten a bit ahead of themselves. But if you want to argue that $20 of the price of oil is speculation, long dated futures are the last place to support your argument. Last October when oil hit record prices the calendar spread between 6 year...

Arbitrageurs replicate shares of the ETF throughout the trading day and then trade creation units at the close in order to zero out their inventory. I'm quite certain they don't actually rely on the IIV datafeed, instead calculating the fair price themselves based on their own cost models...

Well, you were wrong before and you're wrong now. AMEX datafeed contains NAV estimates (Intraday Indicative Values) that are updated every 15 seconds throughout the day. http://www.amex.com/?href=/etf/Glossary/Gloss.htm BTW, another cost related to ETF arbitrage is the creation unit cost...

I second the recommendation of the Ikea Jerker desk. It's a clone of the AnthroBench (www.anthro.com), which is undeniably better, but costs 5 times as much. I used an Aeron chair for 4 years and it's not bad. If you don't have air conditioning, or just sweat a lot, the mesh is a great...

The airline industry as a whole has failed to make a cumulative profit over its entire history. Martin

Another worrying fact about China. Most of Chinese youth grew up in one child families. I don't mean to insult anyone but an entire generation of only children doesn't exactly seem like a recipe for stability. From the article, that mob sure sounds like they were used to getting what they want...

Efficient markets mean different things to different people. There are at least three different forms of the efficient market hypothesis. Also, you haven't defined what you mean by "capitalizing" or making money in the market. So, this question is pretty much a Rorschach test. Even in a...

That's not actually true. The free market does a lot of things very well, but attaching the correct economic value a shared and limited resource is not one of them. This is known somewhat melodramatically as the "tragedy of the commons." Such shared resources include the air we breathe, the oil...

Wrong! OPEC increased production by 2.5mbpd in December '97 just as Asian demand was getting clobbered. It was a mistake they haven't quickly forgotten. Still, a few production cuts later and oil was back in their price band. Today, the situation is very different. OPEC is pumping flat out...

All you people who think GOOG is the next MSFT... even if you're right, it's not going to make you rich. MSFT has 3 times the market cap of GOOG. CSCO 1.5 times. GE 4.5 times. YHOO just a bit more than half. If you buy GOOG today, you are buying a speculative growth stock that will never be a...