Nobrainer’s Think Tank

I’ve definitely not upgraded my PC to Vista; I have little need to. Although I have been, and remain, curious about Vista given that I simply haven’t used it. The commentary about it has been overwhelmingly negative, but I’ve always had a sense that people were saying bad things about it because other people said bad things about it. Herd mentality strikes again! But Microsoft may have come up with a clever way to work around and start changing those impressions:

Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a “new” operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that “Mojave” was actually Windows Vista.

“Oh wow,” said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches.

Good luck to them.

The Chinese have apparently had capped electricity prices for some time. Well, when the cost of coal went up, the generators started losing money and some of the generators shut down, leading to some electricity shortages. So the Chinese gov’t imposed price controls at the mines. So the price of coal arriving at the ports went up. And now the Chinese gov’t is imposing price caps at the ports. Talk about chasing your tail!

The world’s fastest-expanding major economy faces such acute power shortages that electricity-sapping industries including aluminum smelters have had to halt production.

Energy supply shortages have become a “key factor” in holding back the nation’s economic and social development, the Chinese government said in a statement yesterday.

To conserve energy and cut the nation’s demand for oil, Premier Wen Jiabao ordered the nation to cut back on summer air conditioning and drive less, according to yesterday’s statement. The nation will also shut more oil-fired power generators, it said.

Of course, more price controls will invariably lead to greater shortages. I really don’t see the benefit of low prices if there is nothing there to be bought.

It’s worth pointing out that the Chinese are facing actual shortages, whereas we are having to cope with ample supply @ higher prices. We tried the price control and shortages thing a few decades ago. Fortunately we still seem to have enough sense to try to avoid repeating that. Anyway, let’s welcome the Chinese to the 1970s. I hope they like disco.

You may have seen in the news recently that Iran tested a bunch of new missiles recently. In addition to having doctored some of the photographs of the test, there are now very public doubts that they launched as many missiles that they claimed to and whether any of the rockets actually contained any new technology.

From the Telegraph:

Analysis of Iranian television coverage has also indicated that one of the weapons actually remained on the ground but the video was doctored in an effort to cover up the failure.

Iran also issued misleading statements about the ranges and doctored videos to make the firings seem more numerous and fearsome than reality, The New York Times reported.

Coverage showing what appeared to be many missiles being fired was apparently just one device, filmed from different angles. “Deception was rampant,” said Charles Vick, an expert on the Iranian missile programme at Global Security, a prominent defence think tank.

Despite the deception, the Pentagon said it was taking the tests seriously, viewing them as an attempt further to destabilise the region.

“We don’t believe this exercise to have been an illusion,” said Geoff Morrell, a spokesman.

But he added: “They were not testing new technologies or capabilities, but rather firing off old equipment in an attempt to intimidate their neighbours and escalate tension in the region.”

Well there ya go.

Unfortunately the Telegraph completely botched the math in their last paragraph.

Last week’s missile tests sent oil prices soaring from $136 to $147 a barrel, delivering a windfall gain worth billions of dollars to Iran’s oil-based economy.

The windfall, I would have to presume is the $11 premium which showed up after the test. Since Iran exports about 2.5 million barrels a day, it would take them 36 days to receive a windfall of only a single billion dollars. It would be many months before they could receive several billions.

One might conclude that Iran will earn more from oil than they spent on the tests. If so, it sounds like a good investment on their part — probably not the best investment — but a good investment. However, if their display really does consist of a lot of fakery, that certainly does not make their defense services seem very credible: the test makes them seem less dangerous.

Therefore we must conclude that the test was not actually perpetrated by the Iranians. Instead the US clearly staged the whole thing both to help George Bush’s oil friends and to make a future invasion of Iran more likely and acceptable. It’s kind of like Spies Like Us. Good movie, by the way.

On side note, could the media try any harder to use some combination of the words “sky high” or “soaring” whenever they talk about oil or gas prices?

The quote, from a candidate who I will let remain nameless:

TAPPER: But…proponents of school choice say that the best way to change the status quo is to give parents, inner-city parents a choice. Why not?

[Candidate]: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom. We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools.

So what I’ve said is let’s foster competition within the public school system. Let’s make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let’s make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.

But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools. That’s going to make things worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.

The analysis:

Finally, note the political mastery here. Take the question of how many kids would leave government schools for private schools under a full school competition system. [He] wants to be on both sides of this assumption, sometimes assuming the number is small (when discussing benefits) and then assuming the number is large (when discussing costs). [He] is a master because he makes this switch back and forth from sentence to sentence. First, the number leaving public schools is low, since choice would just benefit “some kids” (Bad old rich ones at that) and leave our [sic] “a lot of kids.” He again in the next sentence implies the number switching must be low, because there are not many private school spots. One sentence later, though, the number switching is high, since it would be a “huge drain of resources.” And then, in the third paragraph, the number switching is very high, since all that are left in public schools are a small core of the “hardest-to-teach kids.”

I recently ran across another instance of having it both ways, not related to politics, but to the topic of peak oil. (more…)

Clearly feeling inspired by John Edwards, Congress has determined that the solution to all of our problems is the lack of ability to sue.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

“This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.

Because the Congress never does anything that blocks supply and demand. Nope. Never. They never offer subsidies to American farmers for ethanol. They never impose tariffs on imports. They never threaten to steal for oil companies for having the gall to make too much money. Nor would they ever go so far as to prevent American oil companies from producing American oil. No no no. Congress are the purest of free traders.

Gutless asshats.

A couple things:

1 - I’m getting really sick and tired of people blaming oil prices on speculators. As far as I can tell, this widespread fascination and belief is pretty much akin to Big Foot. There’s no real evidence to support the belief, but since no other explanation is palatable, the explanation about speculators holds. And it holds well, I think, because upset people can blame some small, mysterious group of nefarious rich people.

Today a column on MarketWatch showed great “evidence.”

A boom in speculation and trading by investment banks and hedge funds has put our energy markets on steroids. Contract volume in the futures markets has risen by a third in just the last year. Oil closed at a record high of $125.96 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday. That’s double the price two years ago, a difference clearly caused by market manipulation.

He used the word “clearly” so he must be right.

2 - Refineries aren’t the problem. The EIA breaks down gasoline costs and shows to what extent refining contributed to the cost of gasoline. Right now, it’s about 8%. Yes, in the summer, the cost of refining can go from the ~26 cents it is now to maybe even 90 cents. But if we average it out over the last few years, refining has contributed only about 44 cents to the cost of every gallon. Reckoning that refining isn’t going to be free any time soon, we can build all the refineries we want, but we’re not going to save tremendous amounts of money as a result, at least not at current trends. So good luck convincing refiners to build gobs of new capacity (and it’s capacity we need, not “refineries,” per se) so that they can ramp up production, collapse premiums, and try to make up hundreds of millions of dollars in investments while operating at cost.

Some dolt writing at Foxnews was the motivation for the 2nd bullet point. He, like many, is willing to list refining capacity as a problem even though he admits that he has no fucking idea about anything relating to refining other than that it exists and, shockingly, costs money.

Although, there was a comment at the Coalition of the Swilling which, at least approached the refining issue in a better way.

I’m more concerned about supply than price, truth be told. Refining is a genuine bottleneck in the system. Witness the problems in the gasoline supplies post-Katrina.

I think that is a valid point, and it may even be worthwhile to pursue. However, we’re talking about an insurance policy. We’re talking about adding a premium to every gallon of gas just to be better prepared in case of an emergency. We’re talking about paying to either create huge stockpiles of refined product, or we’re paying for refineries to be built and not run. That may sound bad, but it is actually fairly analogous to the electrical grid. At any hour of the day, generators are being paid to be ready, but to not run. So, all in all, it’s not a bad idea, but it’s definitely not free.