According to my accounting book (Accounting. Warren Reeve Fess. Pages 493 to 495), there are a couple types of dividends: Cash dividends and Stock dividends. Cash dividends require formal action by the board of directors, as well as sufficient retained earnings and of course the cash itself. Stock dividends, on the other hand, just add more to the stock. If I'm reading my book correctly, that is. I'm not a CPA.



Equity = Assets - Liabilities. Always. What you have minus what you owe. Nothing special about it.



Other than you're whining about dividends, which basically amounts to whining about Equity. Something wrong with a company having more assets than liabilities?

except that a number of opec members have grossed as much $$ in 6 months during 2008 as they did in the ENTIRE YEAR of 2007. (no, I don't think that's FYs, either. As well, oil from western Asia is set to gross ONE TRILLION $USD this year!)

Although I've read from more than one source that the petrochem futures bulls are inflating the prices somewhat, I believe the majority of the blame for US's current inflation problems lies in the scummy Arabian oil barons selling crude for far more than it would be worth if we could drill off America's shores. The second most of the blame lies in the inept US federal reserve.

I've also been told that petro futures are a modern version of fool's gold.

And of course, thanks to a certain leftist political party here in our federal gov, WE CAN'T DRILL FROM OUR OWN NATIVE RESERVES.

(insert mandatory cussing, screaming, and flailing arms here)

Your comment made me find a very interesting pair of data points.

One is from an interest group, Citizens Against Government Waste, who have a pretty broad way of defining pork spending. According to their 2008 Pig Book, the last federal budget cycle included $17.2 billion in pork.

The other from Microsoft's annual statement as posted at Yahoo Finance. Their net income for their last fiscal year was $17.681 billion.

The pay for members of Congress is the real chump change here; there're only 535 of them, so together they only earn about $90.5 million. (That's just pay; I couldn't quickly find a good cost analysis of their benefits packages, which are very good.)

Also, "votes to raise its own salaries" is not entirely correct, at least not since the 27th Amendment was ratified in 1992: "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." Technically, we're supposed to throw the suckers out if they get to posh with the paychecks.

"Their net income . . ."

. . . isn't necessarily wasted money. I suppose we're being a bit guilty of not seeing the forest through the trees: The question is, how much of that profit or how much of our taxes is being spent on something constructive, and how much of it is being spent on what we would consider wasteful.

The first step I suppose is to decide what's wasteful and what isn't. Unfortunately, we may have varying opinions and may not agree on what constitutes waste .

Neat theory - but there are 1,157 Billion barrles of oil in the proven reserves of the top 12 countries. Of which we have 21 billion barrels. Add another 10 billion in 'theoretical' unproven reserves such as ANWAR and the off shore drilling, and that brings us to (31/1157)~ 2.7% of the worlds oil. That's *WITH* Anwar and the offshore drilling.

So - I'm thinking maybe it's smart to try something else for awhile.

It would be, if oil had highly flexible price/demand ratios. It takes a big jump in price to cut demand a couple percent, adding a couple percent to the market will create a big drop in the price.

When it's a necessary use and you're hosed if you don't buy it, minute supply changes can have massive effects on price, and oil is one of the worst. Just a bill passing congress that lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling would drop futures substantially.

Um why would it? The 'present' market won't be changed for ten years, which means the futures market won't be changed for nine and a half years. Market traders read the same charts the rest of us do - shutting down the factories in southern China has more effect than drilling will even when it's complete.

Worse, if you *do* initiate drilling, you're actually digging us in further since that means anyone that starts exploiting these resources is invested in making sure they're still valuable ten years from now.

Hand out those leases, and Exxon Mobile is immediately invested in making damn sure there are no good electric cars for twenty years, because if there is, they're stuck holding the bag on ten years of investment with no return on it.

Better to not mess with it at all frankly. How many billions of dollars will it take to plant the southwest with solar farms? Beats the hell out of spending the money in Iraq.

Jonnan

In other words, democratic systems are messy. I think the Churchill quote goes "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Until someone has a better idea, we really just have to accept ongoing arguments about scarce resources, whether it be oil, tax revenue, or water (the new oil--wait 'til mid-century, you'll see).

I'm a small-r republican because I used to be a philosophical anarchist (the opposite of the bomb-throwing kind). Both democracy and capitalism need checks, at least until we have grown much closer to the Star Trek utopias or Iain Banks' Culture.

Yeah, so far democracy has done the best job at preserving the idea that the community decides which direction to go in the future, rather than stuff being dictated to them by somebody who may not have the interests of the community in mind. I think the Churchill quote is a good one.

Free market economics works on a similar principle: Customers get a choice between competing companies, and therefore "votes using their wallets" for the company they think best meets their needs. If something is centralized, then there's no longer a choice, and it's up to the centralized entity to ensure the product meets the needs of the customers. Sometimes, that may actually work - but more often than not it doesn't, especially as the centralized entity gets larger and has to provide to a larger, more varied customer base.

Ten years is a lie, you don't really believe your representatives do you?

When some crazy fuck spends a decade spouting nonsense about how global warming is caused by a trace element vital to the survival of flora, and then claims the warming will create a cascade effect that dooms the planet, I tend to write them off as a crazy fuck. Believing anything they say in relation to oil is a sign of mental instability.

ANWR is two years easy. Offshore drilling would take ten years to become fully operational. That's fully, as in every place they can drill is being drilled. It's a few months for them to move currently existing mobile platforms into new positions, and many of the areas border currently drilled areas, slant drilling will reach them. Months yet again. Only the harder to reach areas that don't have pre-existing infrastructure close to them are ten years away. Even the oil shale is supposed to be 3-5 years max. If it was signed today, ten years from now many of those pockets of oil would already be dry.

Now, value. Oil is not contingent on gasoline. Lubricants, plastics, fertilizers. Oil will be useful well beyond the fall of the combustion engine. Oil drilling is also extremely profitable at $60 a barrel, even oil shale, currently the most expensive extraction requirement, has a current estimated cost of $40 a barrel. That's a 50% rate of return on each barrel. It's refining that has shitty margins, and they refine vastly more than they drill right now.

Most politicians are habitual liars, and I'm not just picking on the idiot democrats. I can think of one republican senator I'd not like to see thrown out of office right now, and no he's not the ass fucker of a presidential nominee. Believing anything they say about drilling at this point is just begging to be fucked over.

What it will do is make us more efficient. For other options to be available, I'm thinking the petrochem inflation will have to rise into the stratosphere (which it may), so that we overcome our technophobic, political backlash resulting from the Three Mile Island incident. With nuclear power, separating hydrogen from H2O via electricity and/or heat becomes viable over gasoline... or so I think.

Of course, replacing all gas engines with diesel engines and running off of cooking grease could, possibly, work.

Sure, if you want to devote the entire worlds farm land to making grease...

Biofuels are a pipe dream born of idiocy. The greenies pushing them are just so fucking stupid they can't tie their own shoes. Brazil can do it because Brazil is burning down the rain forests and planting unfertilized crops of heavy fertilizer requiring stuff that wipes the fertility of the ground out in just a few years, before then moving onto the next swath of trees. When they run out of rain forest, something that's doing more to warm the earth than the rest of industry on earth, they're fucked.

To do it without a rain forest to burn, you have to put more petroleum into the ground in the form of fertilizer than you get out in the form of fuel. You also need to find a substitute for food, because we wont be growing any.

Nuclear power is a nice one though, alas nuclear fuels are also of limited supply. Probably vastly more than we think, but still limited. The only permanent solutions are cold fusion or harnessing the energy that burns off into space every day. Cold fusion may or may not be a pipe dream as well. The main problem isn't power though, it's storage. Even fuel cells are inadequate to the task right now, it requires massive weight to get high mileage out of them, and costs a fucking fortune. You need a low weight solution for small cars, and not one that adds ten grand to the price of a car that costs that much to start with. Batteries fucking suck. A combustion engine burning hydrogen on the other hand would be an extremely effective means of transport, if you could convince everyone, not to mention correctly, that they wouldn't blow up in a massive fireball the first time they had an accident.

Also, the other options are coming, regardless of the price of oil. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, and we know there's a finite end to oil. Price will have a substantial effect on the level of research being put into alternatives, but they're coming regardless. Even if the rate at which oil is replenished vastly outstrips our current thinking, we're going to hit that brick wall where the continuous flood becomes a trickle. The difference is some of us look at it from a historical perspective and are assuming the problem will solve itself before then, and some of us are convinced we need to actively discourage the use of oil in advance by coming up with crazy doomsday scenarios that are entirely unwarranted. We may already have a battery that takes the electric car from pipe dream to reality. Another five years or so should tell whether they have a functional and cost effective implementation. Something people don't seem to realize when jizzing themselves over a 4 hour recharge on a 30 thousand dollar car with a 50 mile range, is that 50 miles is insufficient for primary transportation for about two thirds of the country. That's less than an hour of driving.

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Many electric cars are up to about 200 miles, and yes I think that eventually we'll find something that stores more energy and recharges faster.

It might not even be a battery - other technologies like super capacitors may also work, and capacitors have the advantage of being able to charge very quickly. They don't yet have the same amount of storage as a battery, but it's a new area of research.

Hmmm, I'm not entirely with you yet, but your frequent swearing and sexual reference's are slowly winning me over.

So basically, lets screw the pouch (as you might put it) to get short term world wide production up and the it will all be OK. For a couple more years at least.

Then when that party goes bad, we can swear at lefties some more.

Now I quite agree its ok so insult lefties, but the biggest mistake the right can make is to make this a them vs us issue. As opposed to the reality of a, peak of easy access oil, and world wide economy expansion based on an oil economy.

I'm not a Environmentalist, and I'm not even slightly liberal. I am a good economist though, and I assure you that even without Environmental considerations, it would be very wise to invest in Nuclear Energy and Hybird tech. The quest to a return to cheap oil is just going to wear your forehead out, and the brick wall won't mind a bit.

I think Plato had it better. Democracy is just the worse (although the most likely and achievable) of the 3 good forms of government.


Now if only the world would just install me as their Benevolent Kingship I can start the good work.

Really - just allow me a few years as the head of a malevolent dictatorship, and your benevolent kingship will look *much* better afterwards - Seems to be working for McCain anyway.

As an added bonus, you'll get badly needed experience of dodging my sexy but deadly ninja-assassin-gynoids while I'm in charge, which always looks good on a resume.

Unless you don't dodge, but in that case kingship might not be the job you want anyway - {G}

Jonnan

. . . and I'd like to add that even with the relatively short range of the electric cars, it's still more than enough to get to work and back, which is something most people do on a daily basis.

I can still keep a gasoline or hybrid vehicle around for long trips such as vacations.

Even if I'm using the electric (or plug-in hybrid) car for just work and errands, that's still the vast majority of my driving, because I take that trip daily!

As far as democracy vs other forms of governments goes, a democracy gives people the most freedom and flexibility. Even the best intentioned king or dictator can have an inaccurate picture what his people want, and since they were usually in wealthy positions, they generally were out of touch with the lower and middle classes.

In addition, it can be very difficult for a person with a lot of power to use it responsibly. Without checks and balances, it can be very tempting to abuse the power for personal gain at the expense of the well being of the entire nation. By dividing the government into several branches as most democracies have done, there are some checks and balances on power. Our president may be the most powerful individual in our nation, but he can't make a single law without congress, and the supreme court can always declare a law unconstitutional.

In addition, a democracy is not just about the form of government, but a fundamental shift in how the next leader is chosen. Yeah, you may be a nice, benevolent king - but your successor may be chosen by heredity, and may be the rebel in the family and may not be good at ruling, and may be somebody hated by the people. And oh yeah, the people will be stuck with him until he dies, which may be a long time.

The method of choosing the next ruler has always been a weak point for other forms of government. In fact, the word "democracy" is simply a description of how the next ruler is chosen, with the idea that giving the people the right to choose their leader gives the people more power.

You might say our president is "overthrown" by the people every four to eight years. This means that the people can decide relatively often what type of ruler they want. With other forms of government, a ruler can keep power for life, even if he lost favor with the people a long time ago.

Our government is also federalized (divided into states, counties, cities, etc): Sometimes decisions can and should be made at a more local level rather than at the national level. What a ruler decides may work in his home city, but may not work out for the rest of the country. We still haven't completely figured out how much power the lower levels of government should have, but then again neither has any other form of government I know of.

I think Plato's student Aristotle is more interesting here, not least because I'm regularly susceptible to the old academic claim that The Republic is a satire. In his Politics, Aristotle extends the three categories Plato uses by cross-cutting them with the core value judgement: good vs. bad. I think he was on to the more imporatant part of the analysis here b/c no form of government will work well if the leadership is, um, frakked in the head.

This means a bad democracy is mob rule, such as classical Athens occasionally saw. But good democracy takes advantage of the general tendency of groups to make better decisions than individuals (Aristotle is the first written claim here, the notion is not really scientific, but it is still persuasive--even marketing worth, what with that Web 2.0 natter).



Sort of. Unfortunately, the executive has extensive authority to establish regulations and can issue executive orders (even secret ones) covering a wide range of gov't activity. Congress is the source of fundamental legislation, but through history they have used that power to delegate *lots* to the executive, starting with the budget process changes early in the 20th and getting much messier through WWII, the Cold War, and the rise of regulatory bureaucracies in the post-war decades.

Perhaps more importantly, the Supremes cannot *always* declare a law or executive action unconstitutional. First, they can't start anything on their own--someone has to bring a suit before them. Second, they really do tend to uphold the judicial tradition of precedent, so their power is rarely as arbitrary as this line makes it sound. There are certainly exceptions to prove the rule, but on the whole they try to remain detached from the short-term flurries of public opinion.

Re "how the next leader is chosen," don't forget that democracy does not require an executive branch at all, much less a singular one. The debates that led to the US constitution included calls for our presidency to be plural, like the executive in some modern US cities and counties (commissions and boards with weak chairs and weak or no mayors).

Did anyone read the articles on the "secular trading" of oil? man thats some scary stuff.