Fallujah is not nearly as bad as it was a year ago. But heck, we could tell that by the way the name dropped out of the nightly news. No one in the mainstream media (MSM) is talking about Fallujah because the surge has turned into a success story.
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An interesting point from the same source about what we can expect from oil prices over the next several years.
I've said time and again that it costs about $15 to extract a barrel of oil from the stony clutches of the Earth's crust. With oil selling over $90 per barrel, people are going to want to get in on that cash flow; that's 500% profit, and that rate of return is immense.
And, of course, when there is a greater supply of crude oil entering the world market, prices for crude oil will drop.
Right now oil is expensive because the supply is being artificially limited. Thanks, OPEC. But I can't blame them; they're attempting to maximize their rate of return. Everyone does that. (You have a limited supply of labor you can sell, so you try to maximize what you get paid for it. Don't you?)
It's the same as with diamonds. The DeBoers control the world diamond supply; if it weren't for their monopoly, diamonds would be about as expensive as river rock and finished stones would fetch about as much as cubic zirconia. Diamonds only cost a lot because they are artificially scarce.
That's really the issue here, not that the oil supply has peaked; it hasn't. The upward pressures on oil prices are political.
This article made Netscape bomb to the desktop when I tried to read it; I was able to read it fine in Internet Explorer, though. So the few remaining Netscape users out there, beware. Fire up your backup browser and read that article. It's chock-full of interesting information on why oil costs so much now and why it's not going to last.
Kyaa ha ha ha ha ha.