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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim black who wrote (69962)	7/16/2008 2:36:54 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Thanks for the update Jim. I used to think Davy Crockett was amazing killing a bar when he was only three, which of course would NOT be considered good form these days. Also, the Alamo was a very frightening concept = I was reading comics about Davy Crockett at about age 10 I suppose. You are late to cynicism about your government. I reached substantial cynicism about governments in my late teens and was well on the way in my mid teens. The very idea of wanting to be the boss of such a lot of people, military and all seems absurd. Anyone wanting out of the army is not insane, so therefore they can't leave. Anyone who is insane doesn't want to leave. There's a Catch22 for government too = anyone who wants to be the boss is ipso facto unfit for the purpose. That's one of the reasons royalty is good. The poor little guys are already psychologically entrenched in doing it before they get old enough to realize they have been fitted up for a very questionable occupation and life. Few have the courage to abdicate. They are given not too much power, but enough to call elections and to have the following of the public if the politicians get too disputatious and raucous. I used to be anti-royalty, but now I think it has some excellent features. I quite like that Queen Elizabeth II has presided over New Zealand for nearly all my life and seems likely to keep going for another decade yet. One of the perks is that it really gets up the nose of people who are too full of themselves and who lust after power, such as Helen Clark [the coven leader of NZ's government in Helengrad]. Princess Di was nice. She and Charles visited Tauranga about 1981 and security wasn't too desperate then and she shook hands with our 5 year old and we could take a photo of them both posing from one metre away. But in 1974 we could walk up to the door of 10 Downing Street [there was just a pleasant constable standing outside] and we could walk up to the White House. I could wander into Qualcomm buildings and get in a lift [elevator] with Andrew Viterbi, no questions asked, other than by Andrew in some chit chat. Now, things are locked up tight. You can expect to see a big fall in energy prices as financial relativity theory has its way with everyone. Oil has gone from $10 a barrel in early 1999 to $150 a barrel. That's 15x. In 1974 it went from $2 to $12. And in 1979 from $12 to $40. Bottom to top it was 20x. Then oil fell all the way back to $10 a barrel in 1986. Even with the dilution of the dollar, 6 billion people at it and one thing and another, there are many alternatives to oil, from walking and insulation to cyberspace instead of driving and photovoltaics, nuclear, coal, bituminous goop, and a vast array of ways of saving money, and therefore oil. If oil gets back to $40 a barrel in 3 or 5 years, I wouldn't be at all surprised. I'd be surprised if it doesn't fall a LOT. The pressure is huge. SUVs are being swapped for bicycles and teeny little cars. It could go down to $30 and possibly even $20. To shut down competition, oil has to get really cheap. Once a wind turbine, photovoltaic panel, geothermal, nuclear reactor or insulation have been installed, even free oil doesn't turn them off. Free would turn off a nuclear reactor after a while, but it wouldn't turn off the others. Mqurice