[Windmills]

People dislike the rich for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, envy. There is also outrage due to the deceit of the rich as they disingenuously declare they are rich because they are “smart and hard-working,” only later to be exposed as corrupt or having been critically assisted by inherited wealth. There's also the condescending attitude of supposedly being harder-working and smarter despite there often being no proof of that. Violating the ideal of "one man, one vote" also perturbs people when they see the rich having more political influence than the rest of us. I'm also not sure if subscribing to corporate welfare or getting rich off the people's taxes through government contracts somehow makes you better than the people paying those taxes. Then there is the issue of private taxes (as opposed to government taxes). I define private taxes as someone in private sector taking the fruits of someone else's labor.

Many people derive their wealth not from the fruits of their own labor, but from that of others, by being able to levy a private tax on them. They may do absolutely no work at all that generates income in their business, but the laws are written to allow some people to do nothing yet still take money from others that do. Still others do some work, yet take more than they've earned. Many people are rich simply because they take advantage of a system that allows one person to own the labor of another person.

My wife's boss is a good example. She's not any smarter than anyone else, especially when she has to consult her lead paralegal (my wife) on numerous matters. She's certainly not hard working, unless you consider a lawyer to be hard working when she's shopping on Ebay, getting her nails done, consulting with her personal trainer, never working on Fridays, going on vacations, and frequently leaving early (to name a few) to be hard working. She's actually a drain on the law firm with her irresponsible financial and legal antics. She does things her employees warn her not to do and ends up losing money for the firm, either by losing cases or even getting sued by her own clients. However, the law says you can be dumb and lazy, but if you own a few wage slaves, we'll tell the media you're “smart and hard-working.” You might even get on a few magazine covers as businessperson of the year. And the law says we'll let you pay yourself whatever you like from the income that other people generate. And you get to smugly say, “this is MY money that I EARNED because I'm smart and hard-working.” The business would run better without this “smart and hard-working” person.

My father's ex-boss is another. The father-in-law bought the business for his son-in-law because he wanted his daughter to have a materially good life. The son-in-law isn't lazy, but neither is he any harder working than anyone else there. And he's certainly not smarter. He's a business moron. Example: every year he has to have a “yard sale” in which he sells of large amounts of inventory at a loss because he has to make room for things that actually sell for a profit. He's always warned about buying the junk he buys, but he never listens (probably because he's “smarter and harder-working” than his employees). He's also rude, childish, tantrum-throwing, and incompetent at human resources and customer service, driving away both good employees and good customers. The employees agree that the business would make more money and have more repeat customers if he would stay away. They wouldn't even care if he kept drawing an unfair income and went on permanent vacation. Just stop coming around the business. He also keeps around this dirty, stinky, lazy guy who upsets and drives away customers. He's supposed to do work, but he rarely ever does. We'll call him Stinky. Now I think THAT guy is smart. Everyone speculates that, since he's so utterly lazy, useless, and detrimental to the business, Stinky had to have gotten the goods on the boss and blackmailed him into keeping around. Either way, this business would run better without this “smart and hard-working” boss.

On to other things, I wonder how much some businessman would make if he had to really be a “self-made man.” The idea of the self-made man is one the various arguments used to attempt to justify why someone who isn't smarter or harder working than someone else should still get paid more for the same work. So, self-made man, fire all your staff, your secretaries, managers, your technicians, laborers, and assistants. Even your janitors. Do it all yourself, “self-made man,” and see how much income you generate. See what it's really like to be smart and hard-working. Maybe the cleaning and paperwork alone would whack you down to just a couple clients per day. Not so much money in the mole-removal business now, doc? Well, then, I guess only the most expensive procedures would ever get done. Everything else would have to be abandoned by these “self-made men.” If you want to pat yourself on the back and say you did it all by yourself with no one else's help and I'm better than you because I'm rich, then get rich without depending on another living soul. Then you did it yourself. Be proud then, but not before. Or pay your slaves what they earned and stop telling the world you make more money because you're “smart and hard-working.” You don't. You stand on other's backs.

Most people get rich because the law allows the keeping of wage slaves. Perhaps modern work could also be considered better-paid tenant farmers or sharecroppers. The percentage of their labor that people are allowed to keep has fluctuated throughout history, but the basic system has never really changed: as you accumulate more wealth, the probability rapidly accelerates that you've done so by skimming the sweat of other people. It's not your hard work or your intelligence, but that of others, that has enriched you.

[Cloud9]

Wage slaves, you mean those folks that sat in the back of class and never paid attention. You or your wife had the option of going to college for seven years and setting up your own firm. It is not too late. You can still do it.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AAA', 'r')angerone314,

Why is there always resentment against the rich? Because of jealousy.

Most rich people work harder, smarter, and longer than 99.9999% of Americans, including you and me.

Roman Abramovich spent roughly 5% of his net worth on that yacht. I am about to buy a Honda CR-V that will be way more than 5% of my net worth.

Who made the more expensive purchase? I did.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AAA', '
')Ludi gives me a lot of flak for my stances on income, net worth, and the $250k yearly income middle class here in SoCal.

[Windmills]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'W')age slaves, you mean those folks that sat in the back of class and never paid attention. You or your wife had the option of going to college for seven years and setting up your own firm. It is not too late. You can still do it.

[AAA]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '
')
My household made about $90k ONE YEAR in SoCal, bought land in another state, had a house built, and moved ourselves and our business to a slightly more affordable state. If you make $250K as a YEARLY income year in and year out you can retire young to a life of relative ease in another state. Personally, I can hardly conceive of that kind of earning year in and year out and BITCHING about being "middle class."

You spoiled brat. Yes, you. Young enough to be my child.

[AAA]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', ' ')Nobody gets to that level of wealth simply by being a good person and a real hard worker.

[Windmills]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AAA', '
')I will disagree. I know at least 4 billionaires that made their fortune in the oil industry and know between 10-20 people that have made over $100 million also in the oil industry.

You might call it luck but I call it perseverance and hard work.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')harles Maxwell is senior energy analyst at Weeden & Co. Maxwell discusses where oil's production peak is and how that affects investments.

Charles Maxwell: The use of petroleum in the world is now up to about 30 billion barrels per year. The rate at which we have found new supplies of petroleum over the last 10 years has fallen to an average, of only about 10 billion barrels per year.

We're obviously in an unsustainable situation. We are now using up a greater number of barrels that we have found in the recent past and that we have reserved in the ground. We are now beginning to use it up relatively quickly--with scary consequences for the future.

(snip)

A bind is clearly coming. We think that the peak in production will actually occur in the period 2015 to 2020. And if I had to pick a particular year, I might use 2017 or 2018. That would suggest that around 2015, we will hit a near-plateau of production around the world, and we will hold it for maybe four or five years. On the other side of that plateau, production will begin slowly moving down. By 2020, we should be headed in a downward direction for oil output in the world each year instead of an upward direction, as we are today.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/13/suncor-energy-oil-intelligent-investing-cenovus.html

[Ayoob]

It looks like this is about to go mainstream, and most of my planning is going to be for little.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ayoob', 'I')t looks like this is about to go mainstream, and most of my planning is going to be for little.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'P')eak crude + condensate occurred in 2005 and all liquids in 2008. That three-year period [u]is the plateau, the time during which the previous store of inexpensive petroleum and petroleum E&P infrastructure is used to acquire the difficult stuff (all liquids i.e. biofuels, extra heavy, shale oil etc.)

[Pops]

Not to sound like I'm short on sense but since this year's production within spitting distance of '08's volume and petroleum stocks in the US at a nominal record - and, oh yea, being in the middle of a worldwide recession no less, it seems a little premature deciding 08 was the peak. This is Staniford's chart from his blog, Early Warning...



Looks like speed bumps on the plateau fer sure, air bubbles in the siphon tube maybe, but the price is about what it was in the summer of 06 and they are pumping 1-1/2mb/d more than in 06. But hey, whatever turns your crank.

Nevertheless, it is interesting po is showing up more and more in the serious financial press, the European media, the green blog at the NYT of course. For a time I though greenhouse gasses and climate change would do as good at getting people to change habits as widespread understanding of po but that idea is on a swift-boat down da riba (or up the creek) - chalk one up for BP (Broken Paddle) and all those good preachers teaching the world what the natural sciences really say and all about the evils of Al Gore and his conspiracy to get rich trading carbon credits.

I guess I've forgotten why I thought it would be a good thing for people to get an understanding of depletion in the first place...


Oh btw, Six, we did talk about this last week, there was lots of noise last week tho, funny how that works out...
maxwell-forecasts-peak-oil-in-seven-years-t59504.html

[rockdoc123]

A number of years ago I posted up my own analysis based on info from WoodMac and IHS Energy which I am privy to. I suggested we would reach peak around 2012 o 2013. The monkey wrench in all of the analyses back then was no one was anticipating a massive recession which basically delayed any predictions made back then. In any analysis going forward we have to imagine how quickly demand will come back, how happy the Saudis are about turning on the taps of the few million barrel a day capacity they have captured in the last few years and what the overall state of the economy will be going forward.
This is not an easy equation....fools jump in to predict when the uncertainty is as great as it is currently. I think it is safe to say if the economy does recover (which it probably will at sometime given history) our worldwide demand for energy will continue to increase and given the alternatives don't make a lot of economic sense at this point in time, nations will be wed to the hydrocarbon model. It is impossible to argue this is not a finite energy source...just as the destruction of all the vegetation on Easter Island may have contributed to that population destruction (I realize this is a hypothesis), eventually we too are doomed. That is unless there is a collective decision made to downsize, to change consumptive behaviour, to want less and be happy with it.

[Pops]

Hey Roc, since you are right here, what's the word on Russia? Do you think they are still going to trend up?

[sparky]

Russia is doing fine , they have some good growth since they started trading off Europe ,
the Chinese and Koreans are people easy to get along with if the only concern is business

Peak Oil is commonly mentioned in financial papers certainly in the Financial Times

The main uncertainty as far as Peak Oil is concerned is
-the " ready to ship "spare production of the Persian Gulf
-the upgrade of the Iraqi production , we are talking of 3~4 millions barrels a day within five years
-the upgrade of the Iranian production , now sadly deflated but , who know ?
-the cost/delay to get deep water fields into production


There are reasons to believe the supply situation is not very good
-
the prices have been very resilient , even though there is a recession on ,
there has been a lot of mapping and drilling in some of the worst possible condition
hardly a sign of easy abundance

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ccording to Forbes there's only one man more powerful in the world than President Obama: His Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

The 67-year-old is "paramount political leader of more people than anyone else on the planet; exercises near dictatorial control over 1.3 billion people, one-fifth of world's population," Forbes said. "Unlike Western counterparts, Hu can divert rivers, build cities, jail dissidents and censor Internet without meddling from pesky bureaucrats, courts."

On China, Forbes wrote:

Recently surpassed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy both in absolute and purchasing power terms. Credible estimates have China poised to overtake U.S. as world's largest economy in 25 years -- although, crucially, not on a per-capita basis. Creditor nation oversees world's largest reserves at $2.65 trillion- - $1.5 trillion of which is in U.S. dollar holdings. Refuses to kowtow to U.S. pressure to change its exchange-rate regime. Heads world's largest army (in size).

Next to that, Forbes' description of Obama and the United States sounds, well, pretty lame..
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-economy/2010/11/in_forbes_list_of_most_powerfu.html?hpid=news-col-blog

[Plantagenet]

The per capita number for China is a bit misleading.

China has perhaps 1-200 million people in urban areas who are already living at near US or EU or Japanese levels....nice cars, new houses and apartments, foreign travel, etc. Then there are over a billion peasants living at extremely poor levels in villages in the country side, many still with no running water.

The wealth and rapid development in urban China is amazing...I'm in Beijing right now, and it is every bit as wealthy looking as Tokyo.