Once again, Dilbert provides a phrase perfectly tailored for the white board.

That’s a little trick I call “math”.

And as a bonus, here’s a good one:

Pick ANY number, but don’t tell me what you picked.

Now double it.

Now add 10.

Now subtract the original number.

Now subtract seven.

Now subtract the original number again.

And the answer is…

THREE!! Muhahahahaaaa! Bow before the awesome power of MATH!!

Friday is date night for Tammy and I. We try to do something special together, just the two of us. We usually go out to a nice dinner, then catch a movie or go shopping. Now, before you start calling me mean names for doing such girly stuff, let me tell you what we did last Friday. We went to the dirt track!

I love my wife so much. She is anything but girly. She loves to go rock climbing and when we snuggle on the couch on Sunday afternoon, it always involves watching NASCAR or football, depending on the season.

I have a little history with dirt track racing. I raced thunder bombers one summer back in college. Please, check out this article in which I wax nostalgic about those days of dirt and steel.

Going to the track is a great sociological experience. You ain’t seen no red neck ’til you been down to the races on Friday night. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have plenty of respect for the working class and I’m a Texan through and through, but if you like people watching as much as I do, then there’s nothing better than seeing Granny whoop and holler for her boy in the 15 car. She most likely will have nacho cheese running down her chin or, if your really fortunate, it’ll be Copenhagen instead.

There is a gas station by the highway where I live. I’m sure you have a similar one in your neighborhood. It’s the gas station that no one ever goes to because the prices are ridiculously high, sometimes nine cents a gallon more than the station just up the road. That gas station, this weekend, posted a price of $2.69 a gallon for regular unleaded (87 octane). Great googly moogly! What is going on here.

I remember the big price scare after 9/11/01. The economy was tanking fast and everyone thought that the rag heads were going to turn off the taps and starve the U.S. of oil. Gas shot up from around $1.15 up to $1.85 in Colorado Springs (as I remember it). I made a pact with myself, that I would not buy gas for more that $1.80, and I pulled it off. I only had to ride my bicycle a couple of times and I managed to hold out until gas came back down. It only took about a week for folks to realize that the oil wasn’t going anywhere and that there was no need to stock pile the stuff.

So, what the heck is going on now? The war in Iraq? Nope. Oil has been flowing freely from Iraq for over a year now. Besides, Iraq isn’t that big of a supplier on the global scale. Terror threats? C’mon, how many times can we cry out for that wolf? The news occasionally blames labor strikes here or there. Rubbish! Even if one entire refining company stopped producing, the others would just step in and make all that money for themselves.

Okay, well, then it must be simple economics, supply and demand, right? That’s what I thought until today. I’d heard that Asian countries were growing fast economically, and that they were starting to buy more cars and drink oil as fast as they could ship it in. That may be true, but that’s no why oil is over $65 a barrel. You may say, “It’s the economy, stupid!” to which I would replay, “Hey, that’s not very nice, and besides, it’s wrong, stupid.”

I submit the following news blurbs:
From rfcnet.org, a Washington based lobby group:

“The economy is continuing to grow, but not as fast as the cost of gasoline. Consumer confidence is down because people are spending money on gasoline they would rather spend on everything from better steaks to new furniture … Oil experts say that the fundamentals indicate the price of oil should be at $38 to $40 a barrel, yet oil futures are trading in the mid $60 range … There is so much oil the refineries can’t even keep up with it and we are running out of storage space. Tankers are sitting offshore unable to unload because storage facilities are full.” ¹

From mosler.org, an economics think-tank:

In the past few months, Morgan Stanley has been accumulating warehouse space in the Netherlands to store its hottest new property: oil … With the stock market proving lackluster, the oil market has been a godsend for the banks, which describe it as the new Nasdaq … Speculators have helped to drive oil prices to near record levels … Oil is the talk of the City with many millions of pounds being made every day … [The oil futures market] acts as a benchmark for the price of oil … If prices on the futures market rise too far above the so-called physical market [mentioned above to be around $40 a barrel], oil users such as airlines and petrol dealers pull out, so prices fall … However, this traditional equilibrium has been rocked by short-term speculators dipping in and out of the futures market. This has led to sharp rises in the price and far more volatility. Meanwhile, banks such as Morgan Stanley are also beginning to move into the physical market to buy oil or even entire oilfields. ²

So, who is driving up the price of oil? Are those dern camel drivers pocketing all your hard earned money? Well, to some degree yes, but not any more than usual. A small group of investors and banks are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of schleps like me and you by artificially inflating the price of oil. Mohamed is not ripping you off, Morgan Stanley (and their peers) are!!

The problem is that oil investments (called “hedge funds”) are out of control.

The International Energy Authority recently criticized the role of speculators. They have also been attacked by French and American government ministers. Alan Greenspan, chairman of America s Federal Reserve Board, said that speculators had caused oil prices to surge … A senior executive at one oil firm said, “This is the hottest oil market I have ever seen. There has been a massive increase in hedge-fund activity … [investments] have doubled recently.” … Hedge-fund insiders therefore say that oil is an excellent short-term bet. ²

Yes, the world is using more oil, but it’s interesting to me that the people making the most noise about a possible shortage are the same people who are raking in millions on oil investments.

Now, before you storm the bank with torches and pitchforks, let’s talk about what can really be done to save our economy from the same folks who orchestrated the big crash in the 1920’s (and the great depression that followed). I don’t have a hundred million dollars to spend on oil futures and even if I did, no one investor could restore the market. In fact, even the President of the United States does not wield enough power to correct the market (even though he is taking most of the heat for it).

The oil market will crash. Any artificially inflated market does (ex. margin stock in the 1920’s and dot-com ventures in 2000). However, I’m not sure that our current growing economy can wait for the market to correct itself.

Governments world wide could do a lot to cut this trend short, by being honest with people about the real cause of the price hike. I don’t believe this would instantly return us to $1/gallon nirvana as some do:

This could all be stopped in one day and the price of oil could drip $20 a barrel … if Treasury Secretary John Snow would hold a news conference and simply tell the truth about the oil reserves on hand and how the hedge funds are manipulating the markets. ¹

Would it help? Sure. Some investors would see that oil prices are artificially high and pull their money out of funds which are heavily invested in oil to avoid losing money on the inevitable crash.

Consumers, believe it or not, probably have the best chance of breaking this market. I know we can’t all ride our bicycles to work. Nor can we effectively boycott gasoline. There are some movements out there to stop buying from the biggest producers (ExxonMobile). That may have some impact, but probably not enough. The consumers that can impact the market are the big consumers: Airlines, utilities, shipping companies, etc.; the folks that buy gas by the millions of gallons. If the airline industry alone were to band together and demand lower priced contracts, it would put a strain on the market bubble.

Maybe, just maybe, between industry demands, intelligent investors, and government exposure, this bubble will burst and we can all get back to the great American past-time guzzling gas at reasonable prices.

So what can you do today? Do what you can to buy less gas: drive smart, car pool, travel as little as possible. Let the big consumers know that want to see lower prices. Contact major airlines and other big fuel consumers and let them know that you will support companies that fight for lower fuel prices and that you will withhold your buying power from companies that don’t. Contact your government representatives (House, Senate, White House, Treasury Dept., and Energy Dept.). Ask them to expose the truth about oil reserves and real cause of these painful prices. You may not have a loud voice, but a chorus of thousands of quiet voices will be heard.

WBQotW #36 is one of those weird, random things that you hear working in a Geek environment. Specifically, this is what my friend and former co-worker Josh Mondragon blurts out from time to time when his computer “freaks out”.

Holy smokes! Where are my pants?!

Yeah, I’ve never been that drunk, but I know people who have.

No this time, I really mean it. In the last few days I have run across some new technologies that just plain rock (or RAWK or r0XX0r or whatever linguistic mutilation you prefer).

For starters, you know how bloggers (like me) are always posting links to news stories or funny pictures or whatever and the URLs that they post are often three miles long and don’t come out right when you try to copy and paste them into an email to every friggin’ person in your address book (usually with a subject like “check out this funny link”) that people like me delete without even opening because we think it’s spam or some virus from that distant relative that we never talk to but that still sends us stupid forwards of funny pictures that we saw back in 1998 but they just found for the first time and they think it’s some new hilarity that they must share with the world? (Whew. Got carried away there.)

Well, there’s a web site out called TinyURL.com. You can go there and copy an above described URL into a form. TinyURL will turn that big behemoth of slashes and ampersands into a tiny URL… literally. Then all you have to put in your soon to be ignored email or blog post is something like http://tinyurl.com/7aods instead of its equivalent…
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2005018313812.gif

Is that cool or what?!

Second… I’m a late to catch on to this (as usual), so if you’ve already heard about out, just smile and nod the same way you do when your dad tells you a joke you’ve already heard him tell three times.

You’ve probably heard of flickr, an image hosting web site that makes it easy for the huddled masses (who don’t have their own web site) to share images with family and friends. Well, flickr has a feature called “Tags”. When you upload your picture to your flickr account, you can give it multiple “tags” which are basically key words associated with the image. Then, you can search for tags on the site, and find all sorts of pictures that have the same tag. It’s a pretty simple concept, but a powerful way to find content that you would not normally be able to find. It’s also a great way to waste the morning! (Such as trying to think of weird words and see what pictures are thus tagged, like “spork” for example.)

Finally, you have most likely heard of “widgets” (and I’m not talking about the abstract economics term). If not, let’s just say that they’re cool little programs that run on your computer and inform or entertain you while you work. If you are a Mac junky, you’ve lived with widgets for some time now.

Widgets have made the jump to the PC mainstream and with a quick download from Konfabulator.com you can get all sorts of cool widgets running on your machine. My current favorite is called Scribbler. It saves your last twenty copies (as in copy and paste) and allows you to paste things that you may have copied a while back. There are also widgets for tracking the weather, stocks, news, etc., or even silly ones like a little bug that wanders around your screen while you work.

I loves me some cool tech!

Dilbert has been one of the most prolific contributors to the WBQotW. Here’s yet another, this time from the Point-Haired-Boss.

Don’t get all mathy on me.

Pardon me for a moment while I vent some serious frustration. I know I’m about a month late on this and that a google search on the topic will yield thousands of bloggers with the same opinion, but I just have to get this off my chest.

<rant>I know that this is an established bit of Americana, but could someone tell me please why mass media insists on latching on to some rich kid’s personal tragedy and dragging it out for months on end under the pretense of journalism?! Every time I see that Holloway girl’s face on the news, I want to puke! The kids dead, okay? It’s sad, yes. It’s mysterious, I suppose. But it stopped being news after the first report. It’s been two months and she’s still making headline news. GAAAH!!

Civil rights groups are up in arms (and I feel rightly so) about the fact that the rich, pretty, blonde, white girl has been headline news for months, but literally hundreds of poor, minority kids go missing every week and are lucky if they make it onto a milk carton. The media coverage has even ruffled the feathers of some media watchdogs who say the disproportionate coverage is bad journalism (*gasp*).

This morning, while peacefully munching my Cheerios, I was driven to rage and was thiiiis close to putting a .25 caliber slug in my TV when Good Morning America ran yet another Holloway story. That alone, was maddening, but not ragening (no, it’s not a real word, but it should be). The rage came when I switched over to CBS only to find them running a story on… SCOTT PETERSON!!! AAAHHHHH!!!!
</rant>

Thanks, I feel much better now.

One of the first blogs that I read regularly was I Awoke In Britannia!, where Ghosty kept me up to date on all the latest Ultima Online dirt. Sadly, Ghosty is closing shop on I Awoke and (no doubt) moving on to bigger and better things. He says he’ll continue to post on UO Screenshots and UO On The Web, but I will really miss his insight and great writing on I Awoke.

See you around, Ghosty, and please send us a link when you start your next enterprise.

WBQotW #34 is another tidbit of net lore. The ol’ sign poorly translated into English bit that has been going around the email junket for over a decade now.

Sign in a Japanese hotel room: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.

I knew those Japanese were horn-dogs, but that’s just ridiculous! You can see many more examples of Japanese to English mis-translations at Engrish.com.