Futures

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Are you sure? I think the effect would be the same: you buy a barrel of oil at 60 euros (or whatever), which equals 100 dollars. Inflation pushes the price up in dollars to 200, even as it halves the value of the dollar. You sell you barrel for 200 nominal dollars and exit at exactly the same real dollar price.
Or am I misunderstanding you?"
Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes slightly. I think your example is correct as far as it goes but if you were confident that the dollar was going to fall wouldn't you change your dollars to euros and buy a defensive commodity in that currency? Then, if oil doubled in dollar price but the dollar value had halved relative to the euro (as in your example) you would have twice the dollar value you had before (in fact more if the hypothesis in the previus link was correct because everyone would be buying the asset).
Perhaps I shouldn't have said "hedge" before when I guess that really I meant a way to profit from the falling dollar.
 

vimothy

yurp
Sketicism over at The Oil Drum:

Luis - just for the sake of absolute clarity. The new well has not yet reached the target reservoir and this claim of 33 Gbs is total hype by a government official talking out of turn. Which just by chance has sent the shares in BG Group, Repsol and Petrobras skywards today dragging the whole of the world oil equities market with them.​
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Gazoline man

What's the price of gas in Europe now ? $9 a gallon ( including $2 tax ) ?

Word today is it will go close to that in the US in the not so distant
$7-8 , possibly $9-10 per gallon
$6 by this summer.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
1,349 per square mile

With current population density in England almost double that of Germany and quadruple that of France, The Conservatives used figures from the Office for National Statistics called for tariff on migration.
Predictions included population increasing by a third over the next 50 years to become the most crowded nation in Europe.
From 50 million to 68 million by 2056.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hmm, I think the pop. density here is more like 2.5 times that of France, but it's undeniably pretty damn crowded, and getting more crowded all the time. Immigration can't continue indefinitely like it is at the moment if we don't want the UK to just get progressively more busy, dirty and stressful to live in. It's got nothing to do with race or culture, though of course there are people of all political persuasions who want to convince us it is. Yes, immigration is 'good for the economy', but the last time I checked it takes more than a 'good' economy (whatever that means) for people to be happy.

Edit: also, the country's population stands at about 60 million today, not 50 million - do your figures maybe refer to England rather than the UK, Poly?
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Hear you T
The figures come from ... The Conservatives via ONS as mentioned , they state 'England' per se.
This whole thread always intends to serve as possible basis for discussion on 'futures' ,
so i'm def not trying to make a point through pop. data quotes -
it becomes obsoledge tooo quickly !
A larger point being - millions around the planet are moving INTO cities.
In the states there is still a move by i guess oldsters to Sunshine states with Arizona picking up many people, but Berlin is probably one of the only major cities I can think of that is possibly still Underpopulated.
And imo that's using 'major cities' in a 'places that are happening' generalizing way ...
Atlanta at capacity, Munich, Shoreditch filling up too ?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"obsoledge"...obsolete knowledge...I like it! :)

The problem in Shoreditch is expecially bad because everyone there is so hip; they need more room per person due do their huge protrusive pelvises. It's an unsung tale of woe. :(
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Aha - 'Obsoledge' - a Toffler form circa 2006 .

Sorry to hear that about those Shoreditch pelvises T,
in the neighborhoods here it's often the weekend party people that spill over the sidewalks,
double - triple baby strollers or the 200 -300 pounders making things feel a tad crowded.
 

vimothy

yurp
James Hamilton thinks that oil prices have peaked:

Let me repeat here that I do not believe that speculation is the reason oil went from $60 to $120 a barrel. The biggest part of that longer term trend is due to fundamentals, not speculation. Notwithstanding, it does appear that speculation has gotten ahead of those fundamentals in the most recent developments.

For the bubble to continue, we would need to see ever-increasing volumes of investment money pouring into the futures markets, and continuing stagnation in global production to ratify them. Even if the former occurs, my best guess is that the latter will not.​

Check the wikpedia page for oil megaprojects in 2008 for more.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
While I would agree with James H link about speculation not being the main reason for hikes,
and the 'hoteling' of future prices sounds on the surface somewhat interesting too (if it's not just another semi suave gesture at mystification),
today oil sits at $129.94 barrel.
His number is / was 120 a barrel, price being a moving target this season.
The whole oil bubble phenom may be cresting tho' - that I could possibly go with.
IF the Saudi's get their prod back up to where it was,
and if Bush doesn't try to get in one more attack ,the ol' 'September surprise' before leaving office !

And then again - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/21oil.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
;)
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I just saw a rather wide-eyed documentary on BBC2 presented by Michio Kaku (professional string theorist and informed-amateur futurologist) about a couple of topics that form the central themes of a book of his called Visions, which I read some years ago.
Some of the main themes are:

  • The idea of 'ubiquitous computing', namely the prospect that at some point in the near future (he thinks twenty years or less) microchips will become so cheap to manufacture that they will start to be incorporated into everyday objects, so that almost everything we come into contact with on a daily basis will have some sort of rudimentary intelligence of its own. Potential benefits of this technology included having "the Internet" (what, all of it?) projected onto the inside of one's sunglasses as one walks down the street (ooh, just what I've always wanted) and tiny implants that constantly monitor one's vital signs for potential symptoms of ill health (sounds like a hypochondriac's wet dream, huh?). A brief mention of the "intellectual explosion" that followed Caxton's printing press 500 years ago, with the admonition that it (unlike the continuing information revolution) was limited to the elite. Well yes, they may have been 'elite' one way or another, but at least they had something to say - have a quick look at some YouTube user comments and tell me this is necessarily a bad thing...
  • The Internet, and its future incarnations and mutations. Perhaps unfortunately, this segment relied heavily on the online 'game', Second Life. They had a few soundbites from a very fat man with a high-pitched voice, neck-beard and horrible white-guy dreadlocks described, almost superfluously, as a VIRTUAL REALITY PIONEER, spoke to a couple who'd met in the 'game', and had various people talking guff about how this environment could 'redefine' how we interact with each other (read: anthropomorphic wolves having gay sex) and how 'virtual' family and friends could one day force our real ones to compete for attention. The stuff about how amazingly 'interconnected' we all are now, and how in the near future we could have virtual family get-togethers with far-flung relatives - including a demonstration by Kaku of some software that allows him to 'dance' with a partner hundreds of miles away - just made me think of what you hear people say sometimes about how the more instantaneously connected we are, the more distant from each other we really become. Or something like that, anyway.
  • Artificial intelligence was the other big thing, and there was some cool footage here of a modular robot that redesigns itself depending on what kind of terrain it has to cope with, and demonstrations of some rather neat pattern-recognition software - but nothing, I thought, to suggest we're anywhere near going beyond *apparent* intelligence into the realms of machines that can really think for themselves, rather than simply follow extremely sophisticated algorithms that have been put together by the clever humans that designed it.
  • Potentially the most interesting bit: some discussion of electronic implants and the wider implications of 'bionics'. A very cool segment talking to a woman who'd been chronically depressed since 1988 undergoing an operation to implant a device in her brain that can electronically stimulate the regions of the cortex associated with mood - they actually brought her out of anaesthesia halfway through the operation, turned the thing on and asked her how she felt, and she replied (lying there, head bolted in place with the top of her skull open) that she felt "like she hadn't felt in twenty years", and smiling...awesome stuff. Discussion then went on to much more speculative things like prosthetic memory and cognition chips, but even just staying with implants that crudely regulate electrical signals or stimulate neurotransmitters, there are some amazing implications for the treatment of strokes, epilepsy, and perhaps conditions like Alzheimer's, Tourette's and autism.

Altogether, though, I thought there was rather too much "technology, wow!" to the programme, too much of a sense of innovation for the sake of innovation without considering what benefits will be brought to people other than the manufacturers and distributors of this technology, people who will (let's face it) use it primarily to advertise, and people for whom the virtual world is a useful get-out clause from real-life social interaction.
 

vimothy

yurp
No, but I'm vaguely familiar with the concept. It's to do with the exponentially rapid development of technology, particularly processor power, right? Moore's Law and all that?

Basically, yeah, but Kurzweill has a pretty fantastic immagination re: improbable visions of the future (galaxies as supercomputers, etc).

On the singularity, Yudkowsky wrote one of the best intros, IMHO:

The short version:
If computing speeds double every two years,
what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?

Computing speed doubles every two years.
Computing speed doubles every two years of work.
Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.

Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again.

Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.

Plug in the numbers for current computing speeds, the current doubling time, and an estimate for the raw processing power of the human brain, and the numbers match in: 2021.

But personally, I'd like to do it sooner.​
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ahh yeah, I thought that had something to do with it - the point at which people invent machines to do their inventing for them.
 

swears

preppy-kei
That whole post-cyberpunk silicon valley "VR/internets/technology is the future" vibe is soooo 90s.

It's all about looking ahead to the flooding and the burning and the starving and the dying. *glaven*
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That whole post-cyberpunk silicon valley "VR/internets/technology is the future" vibe is soooo 90s.

Heh, yes, I remember an article in PC Gamer a few years ago about this, that started something like "Remember that strange time in the mid-'90s when every other magazine in the newsagent had a photo of someone on the front wearing an enormous bulky VR headset, trying to look as if they were exhillarated by this revolutionary futuristic technology, rather than suffering from severe motion sickness and neck cramp?".

It's true, few things date quite as badly as the future.
 

vimothy

yurp
Maybe this should have gone in the politics section. Whatever. Major new report:

'Choose growth or accept poverty for billions' -- Larry Elliott, The Guardian, 22nd May, 2008

The world will contain 4 billion people living in abject poverty by 2050 unless the poorest countries adopt policies to deliver rapid and sustained growth over the coming decades, a report backed by the World Bank and the British government said yesterday.

After a two-year investigation, a group of policymakers and economists published a blueprint designed to allow the least developed nations to emulate the 13 countries that have expanded at an average rate of at least 7% a year for 25 years or longer since the second world war.

Professor Mike Spence, chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, said there was no prospect of meeting the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations - which include halving of the number of people living in poverty by 2015 - without faster growth.

Two billion of the 6 billion people in the world live in countries with stagnating or declining incomes, but the report said this figure would rise to 4 billion if they continued to suffer from low growth.

"The Growth Report kills off once and for all the misguided notion that you can lift people out of poverty in the absence of growth," Spence said. "It is impossible for poor countries to lift large populations out of poverty without growth. Equality of opportunity and a focus on individuals and families, gender inequalities and economic security, however, is critical to maintaining the support for growth-oriented policies."

The report said that the 13 countries that had grown rapidly in the post-war era were diverse, including Indonesia, Oman, Malta, Brazil, Botswana and China, but all had made the most of the global economy. "This is their most important shared characteristic and the central lesson of this report. Sustained growth at this pace was not possible before 1950. It became feasible only because the global economy became more open and more tightly integrated. The global economy is still a work in progress, of course, but its effects have already been dramatic.

"The high-growth countries benefited in two ways. One, they imported ideas, technology and know-how from the rest of the world. Two, they exploited global demand, which provided a deep, elastic market for their goods. The inflow of knowledge dramatically increased the economy's productive potential; the global market provided the demand necessary to fulfil it. To put it very simply, they imported what the rest of the world knew, and exported what it wanted."

Spence said faster growth was possible but required strong leadership, good governance and a commitment to equity. The report divided developing countries into four groups - sub-Saharan Africa, small countries, resource-rich states and middle-income countries - and said growth strategies had to be tailored to fit the requirements of individual nations.

"Growth requires leadership, persistence and engagement with the global economy," Spence said. "It also requires advanced economies to play their part as well - bringing an end to the current focus on energy subsidies and biofuels, and an end to the protectionist policies which limit developing world access to the global markets that are so central to growth."

The study acknowledged that faster growth might worsen climate change but said the onus was on rich countries to promote technologies for cutting carbon and saving energy. "In the interests of fairness, advanced economies, which are responsible for most of the problem, should take the lead in setting medium-term targets for cuts in their own emissions."

It added: "The quickened growth of world GDP has put new pressure on the planet's ecology and climate. This strain may ultimately threaten the growth environment of the last 200 years. If an economy fails to grow, man's efforts to better himself become a scramble for a bigger share of a fixed amount of resources."​
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Re: BB2 Kaku "Visions"

Lol Mr. Tea with your description of the 'VR pioneer' in that program.
That must have been Jaron Lanier , guy made that ol' dataglove, has rattled around town for some years, made music with a Lennon, got thrown off at least one Board I know if.
When interviewing him once in late '80's and VR was all the ting,
we were interrupted by John Perry Barlow who , looking bk now, mercifully took the man off our hands.
Over enthused 'Reality Hackers ' !
 
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