{"id":64,"date":"2008-09-04T04:04:46","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T12:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/?p=64"},"modified":"2008-09-04T04:04:46","modified_gmt":"2008-09-04T12:04:46","slug":"the-great-oil-crisis-of-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"The Great Oil Crisis of 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple things seem interesting about the recent oil price spike:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Where is the &#8220;Oil Crisis&#8221;?<\/li>\n<li>Where is the mention of the trash-by-the-freeway effect?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Huh?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Consider #1. If it were 1973 or 1979 (gas-line years in the States), buckets of ink and hours of heavy-breathing news anchors would have beaten the &#8220;oil crisis&#8221; in to us. Why not this time? Is it because Nixon and Carter aren&#8217;t president? Not literally &#8220;because&#8221; of them, perhaps (though a silly argument could be made for that), but rather, is the mind-set that yielded Nixon and Carter as presidents no longer with us &#8211; even in the media!\n<p>(Just to be clear, a &#8220;crisis&#8221; is what we have when someone wants to &#8220;do something&#8221;. If you don&#8217;t know what that means, wait a few years and watch the results of a few &#8220;do something-ings&#8221;. Hint: The guy who wanted to &#8220;do something&#8221; will <strong>never, ever<\/strong> mention it until they have successfully shifted the blame.)<\/p>\n<p>Or is this &#8220;oil crisis&#8221; missing to only me simply because I&#8217;m not exposed to these media guys. Every few nights, does NightLine lead off with a dramatic graphic mocking The Onion&#8217;s &#8220;War for the White House&#8221;, followed by talking heads wringing their hands and pronouncing this week&#8217;s events a turning point in the history of mankind and proof that there is no end to the &#8220;crisis&#8221;. &#8230;Uh. &#8230; Ah. &#8230; Is NightLine still on TV? &#8230; Whatever.<\/p>\n<p>My bet is that there is a different attitude out there from the one that was prevalent in the &#8217;70s. The air&#8217;s simply been cleared. We don&#8217;t breath that stench any more.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Consider what a true and beautiful thing that is, oh you who bemoan today&#8217;s world.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>#2: A queue or flow system flowing near a critical density will crystalize from the occasional, tiny distraction. Think of how a piece of cardboard blowing slightly toward the traffic lane of a packed, fast-flowing freeway can cause a 1 hour traffic jam. You have driven through such a big slowdown but have seen no cause for it.\n<p>The was no &#8220;cause&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Such slowdowns are a natural characteristic of dense, flowing material in this universe.<\/p>\n<p>The way I understand the world&#8217;s oil system is that it&#8217;s a flow of material from underground muck to hot air thousands of miles away. The &#8220;oil&#8221; changes hands many times. It&#8217;s a huge system and highly, highly optimized. There are predictable elements to it &#8211; both on the source end and on the sink end. But, it&#8217;s so leanly built that the predictability is optimized out of the system. Leaving a classic, saturated, queue\/flow system.<\/p>\n<p>Which leaves us with &#8220;This will happen. You can&#8217;t predict it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That is not satisfying. &#8230; Hence, we have plenty of left-brains ready to supply an explanation for why the coin, this year, came up heads.<\/p>\n<p>There is actually a reason why I&#8217;m guessing that a large part of the oil price spike was simply a traffic jam. I looked all around and found no information that accurately filtered from the &#8220;price&#8221; of oil the effect of the dollar&#8217;s drop against other currencies. Of course, there are calculations out there, but they sure looked like horseshoes and bombing. If the effect of the kahuna of &#8220;explanations&#8221;, the dollar&#8217;s value, is a wild guess then one might suppose that the oil guys who were stuck in the traffic jam simply didn&#8217;t know when that jerk right ahead of &#8217;em would get off the d****d phone and move, for Christ&#8217;s sake!<\/p>\n<p>Quick argument against this: Where are the traffic jams in food? It&#8217;s an old story that &#8220;major cities only have 3 days of food; we&#8217;re all gonna starve; blah, blah, blah&#8221;. The food chain is very evolved and optimized. Where are the (mathematically) catastrophic spikes in the system? Answers I can think of off hand:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Major cities have a lot more food stocked than 3 days&#8217; worth.<\/li>\n<li>There are many alternatives to each type of food. This makes the system robust in the same ways that non-deterministic packet switching systems are robust compared to older systems, and in the same way that traffic flow is more robust through a grid-pattern city than through a more modern, flow-controlled, tributary-to-artery system.<\/li>\n<li>Hey! Remember the toilet paper &#8220;crisis&#8221;? Well, toilet paper&#8217;s <em>kinda<\/em> like food.<\/li>\n<li>And, panicing lunatics played the <strong>OH MY GOD! ALL THE RICE IS GONE FROM COSTCO! <\/strong>card this year.\n<p>So, maybe there <strong>are<\/strong> serious traffic jams in the food system.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple things seem interesting about the recent oil price spike: Where is the &#8220;Oil Crisis&#8221;? Where is the mention of the trash-by-the-freeway effect? Huh? Consider #1. If it were 1973 or 1979 (gas-line years in the States), buckets of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/?p=64\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggy-things","category-money","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}