Tracker,While I agree that PP is a special place, and that a lot of its readers seem to see things very clearly, I would caution against thinking that we are immune to group think and confirmation biases. How many of us sold gold near the peak price and replenished at the lower recent prices?
Stan
As opposed to holding gold and taking a 40% loss? Nobody could have predicted such a dramatic price decline. The math is easy enough to do. Gold has to be 1300-1400 dollars in order for companies like Yamana and Barricks to make money. Having the price stay for so long below production costs is actually very suspicious.While I have not gone through and calculated production costs or break-even prices for a large group of gold companies I have with silver and the results are very interesting…
Certainly 2011 was not the best time to buy either metal, but it was far from a "dumb" decision. Ore yields/quality are declining rapidly for gold and silver and the production costs for oil are rising 10% a year making the need for oil prices to rise, which will in force production costs for silver and gold to rise etc. etc.
Gold is an exponentially growing investment class. Unless you are an old-timer, who cares about the short-term paper loss, when the long-term paper gain is spectacular?
While I have posted this before, nobody responded so it may have been over-looked. I actually think this is the most interesting part of the Myers-Briggs poll. The 11% of individuals who identified with 'S' (14 individuals in all) also identified as having either "introverted" or "thinking" which could help compensate for their lack of foresight ;)
'I' individuals tend to be more thoughtful and observant and 'T' individuals are rational (head over heart decision-making)
9 of them identified as having both 'I' and 'T' (64%)
No 'S' individuals identified as having neither 'I' or 'T' therefore that is why there is an order of importance as I stated in an earlier post above. I believe a lack of 'N' can be compensated with 'I' and 'T' traits
"J' also helps, but is the least important trait difference
I realize I forgot to put %s in the chart above. Sorry about that.
79% of 'S' individuals identified as 'T' and 86% as 'I', and 57% as J. Small sample size of 14 'S' individuals though so take what you will out of this information.
[quote=Stan Robertson]Tracker,
While I agree that PP is a special place, and that a lot of its readers seem to see things very clearly, I would caution against thinking that we are immune to group think and confirmation biases. How many of us sold gold near the peak price and replenished at the lower recent prices?
Stan
[/quote]
I second what Stan says. It pays to stay humble. We all do our best to understand things, but we all have limits too. Realizing our cognitive mistakes can help us grow, but there are usually new mistakes to be made as we grow.
Maybe some Brits can tell us how it feels to lose Empire statusI can answer that with authority. I was raised to serve the British Empire. There are not many of us left. Please don't call me a Brit, unless you want me to return the compliment. Contrary to Left Wing propaganda from the intelligentsia, the accounts of the day show that colonies cost money; they do not generate profits. They were a liability-not an asset. As soon as the prestige wears off so does the desire to maintain colonies. This was one of the main reasons for the de-colonization of Africa. The much disparaged "White Man's Burden" is real. (It has nothing to do with the colour of ones skin.) How many of you would volunteer for the job of District Commissioner? Very few- I see a constant dribble of volunteers to serve Africa fuelled I suspect by romantic illusions of dusky maidens (Chuckles to himself. They come with strings and social sanction attached.) The glamour takes 6 months to wear off for these amateurs. And then the feel "the pull of their roots" and flee. I fled the colonies when the impetus to maintain them disappeared. Who wants the approbation of being a Colonial? I am much richer here in Australia even without all the servants. Washing my own dishes is a small price to pay for being free of the expectation of society that I would have the answer to all their ailments due to my status as a MaRungu. Ask any black African Chief. If the dishes bothered me so much I could buy a dishwasher. There is an valid assumption that our civilization is superior to all others. This view is held by the hapless denizens of our abandoned colonies. The loss of civilization is an ideal that fades fast in the harsh glare of light. In the final analysis- "Why, it is just not cricket old boy."
Good question Arthur. In my opinion, good, decent, intelligent people come from a little more than just a good combination of genes. You need a solid, competitive education, for the growing human beings. You also need a decent set of moral values, to base your entire educational system on.If you care to think about, all three components are currently suffering various stages of decay, not only in US but in the entire Western world. However, from these elements (if you want to call them this way), the educational system is pretty much awful, while the values system is dead (as in non-existing, or as in "everything goes").
Those with a passion for history could confirm to you that, in general, when a society reaches the "everything goes" stage, collapse is inevitable and not too far away…
I would argue that we are not an intelligent species at all. We dont behave like one. As for education i firmly believe that the only people who ever get educated are only those that voluntarily educate themselves and those that learn by their mistakes. the only morals anyone needs is to try to avoid harming other people and our home.
since we cant seem to grasp this most basic of idea's i must conclude that we are not intelligent and geologically speaking our reign of terror will be a very very short one.
I also don't think buying gold at $1800-$1900 was technically a dumb decision. Short-term prices are unpredictable, but long-term trends can be understood.While being humble has it's purpose. Being confident in your knowledge also has its place. I can go outside and find a raccoon track. I'm not going to going to pretend like I think it is a raccoon track and be humble about it. I know how a raccoon track registers into any soil substrate because I have seen it hundreds of times in clay-rich soil, silty soil, and sandy soils. I know how their toes align. I know the distance of their claws from the edge of their toes. I am 100% confident when I see a raccoon track. It's math to me.
There are times when you go out and you literally can't tell the difference between a red fox track and a coyote track because there isn't enough information available. You know all the differences to look for but the way the foot lands in the soil, the differences are obscured. You take a step back, and you see the trail pattern. The stride measurements could go both ways. Given the information, there is no way to differentiate the two animals. This happens. That is when being humble comes into play because you can't push yourself to find the answer because it is not available in the information in front of you. You would think with such entirely different animals you wouldn't find gray areas, but you do. I have seen some of the best trackers in the world get stumped on certain tracks. It really is humbling.
Now I see the composition and the diversity here and I am impressed by what I see. Certainly nobody here knows everything, but I see a lot of value. At least there is more value here than I see in most other places.
I guess my point is to say that it is okay to recognize what you know, as long as you can recognize what you don't know.
Your product is not as valuable as your skill, which is not as valuable as your talent, which is not as valuable as your genes.Comment on Zerohedge. And
Interestingly, the team also found that some of the highly methylated regional areas that appear in modern humans do not appear in either Neanderthals or Denisovans, regions that have been associated with neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and autismPhysorg Interpretation: Cure schizophrenia and you have got yourself a Neanderthal. I am reading the politically incorrect Bell Curve.
I hold to be a self evident truth that no two humans are equal in any measure whatever. (No-not even of equal value. Some are just plain rotten.)Me. We seem to have wondered off topic, as interesting as this all is. Somebody has been reading their Limits to Growth predictions. The fracas the Ukraine in is not about oils, it is about soils. Here Max and guest discuss the conniving ape/pigs real move is into the rich soils of the Ukraine. I find Max's style wanting but his content sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14f6Myygrk0
Aloha! The heart of our national dysfunction is Empire. The fact that our "elected" government leaders can even consider "saving face" in the Ukraine by shipping our own limited liquefied resources across the Atlantic is nothing more than the most absurd grandiosity and hubris of Empire Think!
This same US and British Empire Think even moves us to the Human Empire. That is the ultimate hubris. That is the belief that the Human Empire and its enormous hubris can destroy the Earth. Maybe the human invention of nuclear weapons and nuclear power(Fukushima, Chernobyl) is the Earth's plan to get rid of humans rather than the human's plan to get rid of Earth! Maybe mutating viruses and plagues and hyper infectious disease is the Earth's plan to get rid of humans! Maybe we are just Human Dinosaurs destined to extinction by our own infinite hubris.
Empire and Hubris are synonymous. Can Empire exist without hubris?
The concept of hubris in democratic Athens was a concept that defined the Greeks' morality. It represented the concept that the poor were as respectable as the rich and that the rich should not flaunt their greatness. The Law of Hubris was somewhat limited in scope and drastically limited in direct application. However, the centrality of the Law of Hubris - violating the Law of Hubris constituted a violation against all of Athens and the law superseded assault in prosecution - demonstrates that the Greeks considered the subduing of hubristic acts to be of vital importance for the maintenance of a democracy based on laws.
…we won't even wean ourselves from imports:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-22/is-the-u-s-shale-boom-going-bust
[quote]
Shale gas wells face similarly swift depletion rates, so drillers need to keep plumbing new wells to make up for the shortfall at those that have gone anemic. This creates what Hughes and other critics consider an unsustainable treadmill of ever-higher, billion-dollar capital expenditures chasing a shifting equilibrium. "The best locations are usually drilled first," Hughes said, "so as time goes by, drilling must move into areas of lower quality rock. The wells cost the same, but they produce less, so you need more of them just to offset decline."
That's a tall order when prices are low. Currently, natural gas is moving at about $4.50 per MMBtu – a welcome uptick, but by no means ideal for producers. Even if that climbed to $6, Hughes estimates that shale gas growth would last only another four years or so, at which point even-higher prices would be needed to maintain production, let alone keep it growing.
Speaking last month to Oilprice.com, Art Berman, a Houston-based geological consultant with a similarly sober (and often unpopular) view of the shale boom, called for more realistic assessments of its longevity. "I'm all for shale plays, but let's be honest about things, after all," Berman said. "Production from shale is not a revolution; it’s a retirement party." Berman and Hughes both presented their concerns at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America last fall.
Not everyone thinks this sort of pessimism is warranted. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, Scott Tinker, a professor of geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin has been leading one of the most comprehensive, well-by-well analyses of the four biggest shale gas reserves in the U.S., including the contentious Marcellus formation in the Appalachians. Tinker doesn't quibble much with Hughes' and Berman's observations about well depletion rates, though he interprets the implications differently.[/quote]
I agree that we in the U.S. will not even wean ourselves from either gas or oil imports but domestic production of natural gas will continue even with the current price of gas below the level needed to make lean shale gas wells economical. The expanding gas production is coming from other tight formations using the same horizontal drilling and fracking technology. These other formations produce significant quantities of condensate that significantly improve their economics. The natural gas can be essentially a waste by-product if the wells produce enough condensate.