Last week, there was a fair bit of reporting about Sharon Stone when she said…

I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?

… referencing the earthquake in China being about karma in retribution for Chinese actions in Tibet.
Whilst, to me anyway, being a bit of a “mehh, not really that interested”, I did catch some comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say comments on their News website.

I particulary liked this one on the matter…

People are always entitled to their opinion, but opinions, particularly religious ones that have no evidence to back them up, are often dangerous or offensive to people. It’s no more provable than if I claimed it rained yesterday because the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster was angry with me because I didn’t finish all of my pasta-based dinner.
Ryan Hawthorne, Brighton

A response to Gordon’s views

This is what David Strahan (author of ‘The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man’) had to say about Gordon Browns announcements about the oil price.

Even by the low standards of his Government, Gordon Brown’s recent pronouncements on oil have been surprising. Writing in a national newspaper on Wednesday, he argued that the price of a barrel had soared to $135 because of barriers to production that are “technical, financial and political”.
There are problems here, sure enough, but the word he left out was “geological”, and the omission is crucial. It means he really doesn’t understand the profundity of the current crisis, and explains why panicky initiatives are bound to fail.

F@*%ing idiot economists

There were two stories reported here and here.

Something caught my attention in the second one…

Others assume the reverse: that the price is bound to keep rising indefinitely, since supplies of oil are running short. The majority of the world’s crude, according to believers in “peak oil”, has been discovered and is already being exploited. At any rate, the size of new fields is diminishing. So production will soon reach a pinnacle, if it has not done so already, and then quickly decline, no matter what governments do.

As different as these theories are, they share a conviction that something has gone badly wrong with the market for oil. High prices are seen as proof of some sort of breakdown. Yet the evidence suggests that, to the contrary, the rising price is beginning to curb demand and increase supply, just as the textbooks say it should.

Woooaaaa, what happened to basic common sense in a closed system and a finite resource.
How can decreased demand result in more of a finite source becoming magically available??