Tag: economics

Saudi Arabia

The Iran war mongers are getting a clear warning from Saudi Arabia. Cheney was “summoned” to Riyadh.

The White House has wanted it to be believed that Cheney went about the Middle East “lining up” the Sunni leaders to support the Zelikow plan for further empowerment of the Shia Arabs against the Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq.

2007-05-12: The super-giant Ghawar Oilfield in Saudi Arabia has been responsible for over 50% of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production.

2008-06-21: Saudi oil increase

In the absence of any additional crude supply, for every 1% of crude demand, we will expect a 20% increase in price in order to balance the market.

2013-09-27: You don’t need alcohol to drunk drive

2014-04-02: With the ruler on his deathbed, you gotta wonder what will happen to Saudi Arabia, which isn’t really a historical construct, just held together by crazy (the oil helps too)
2015-01-16: Robb is interesting as always. It seems likely that the end game involves Saudi Arabia, and soon.

Saudi Arabia knows it is in trouble, that’s why the Saudis are trying to buy influence in the west through a cheap oil policy (at the same time, a low price puts the hurt on US frackers and ISIS oil smugglers alike). However, ISIS trumped this effort with Charlie Hebdo. It will be difficult for the Saudis to convince the west they are the real target after the attack in Paris.

2015-02-04: Saudi Arabia Holds All Male Women’s Rights Conference

As is to be expected from Saudi Arabia, a country firmly under the grip of Sharia Law, 0 women attended the event. Perhaps more hypocritically, a single woman is yet to speak at a University of Qassim summit.

2015-08-06: Saudi spending

Social spending is the glue that holds together a medieval Wahhabi regime at a time of fermenting unrest among the Shia minority of the Eastern Province, pin-prick terrorist attacks from ISIS, and blowback from the invasion of Yemen. Diplomatic spending is what underpins the Saudi sphere of influence in a Middle East suffering its own version of Europe’s 30 Year War, and still reeling from the aftershocks of a crushed democratic revolt. We may yet find that the US oil industry has greater staying power than the rickety political edifice behind OPEC.

2018-04-03: Saudis Remake Middle East

But, as sweeping as MBS’s economic and cultural reforms may be, he has expressed no interest in liberalizing the country’s political system. Indeed, the model that seems to best conform to his vision is China, with its dynamic economy, literate population, and authoritarian rule. His efforts are being carried out with 1 overriding goal: to preserve the House of Saud.

State of the World

A remarkable compendium of information at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious.

these are the best of times, ever. some good material to give balance to developmental discussions

Anshe Chung, SL tycoon

Anshe Chung Studios is a company that emerged from inside a virtual world. Driven by curiosity, our founder Anshe Chung decided to test in early 2004 if working in the economy of Second Life could sustain the real life of a person – a young boy in a developing country. She supported him by selling Linden dollars earned by providing services for other residents. In 2006 Anshe Chung became the first avatar with a net worth exceeding 1M US$. She has lead a new wave of virtual reality entrepreneurs who have demonstrated to the world the very real profit-making opportunities that exist within virtual world economies. Today Anshe Chung Studios maintains offices in the real world where it employs more than 80 people full time, and is extended by a huge network of virtual reality freelancers worldwide. It hosts 1000s of residents on more than 40 square kilometers of gated communities in virtual worlds, and in terms of sheer magnitude Anshe Chung Studios has developed more virtual property than any other Metaverse development company.

signpost: anshe is now a millionaire from her SL speculation.

Walmart consumer surplus

By exercising its bargaining power, it squeezed profit margins among the major brands, offering them higher volumes in return. It also engaged the most efficient small-scale local producers as suppliers of store brands, thereby creating for itself a residual source of SDS products that could be used in bargaining with the major (multinational) branded suppliers. Those local firms that were not efficient enough to meet Walmex’s terms lost market share, and many failed. At the same time, the limited set of producers that survived grew, and with prodding from Walmex they became more efficient and innovative, adopting innovations first introduced into the market by their multinational competitors. A similar transformation took place among retailers themselves in reaction to the new business practices that Walmex brought to the country. This means an improvement in welfare for Mexican and American consumers, who now have more, and cheaper, soaps to choose from.

Walmart as a schumpeterian force. I love it.

Peak Water

With water privatization, maybe the waste in places like Las Vegas can be curtailed?
2007-10-22:

N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the hydrological fantasy project of a certain class of US water engineers. In fact, Reisner talles us, N.A.W.A.P.A. would “solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water” – but it would also take “a $6-trillion economy” to pay for it, and “it might require taking Canada by force.” He quips that British Columbia “is to water what Russia is to land,” and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam.

The coming water war in the US is drawing closer.
2007-11-12:

Perdue isn’t the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as “Days of Prayer for Rain” to “humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.”

Tools. If they had raised water prices sufficiently to stop people washing their SUVs, they would not have to humiliate themselves now.
2008-04-23:

Pretty good, but why don’t they come out and say that the southwest of the US is fucked? I guess that would not go down well with their sophomoric “gadget guy” audience.
2008-06-06:

In California, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

It begins.
2008-07-19: Price water properly, and the scourge of Las Vegas will get swallowed by the desert, as it should be. Instead, the failed policies of the oil shock era are being repeated.

Nixon made the OPEC oil shocks worse by capping prices and using coercive government tools to reduce demand. This is exactly what California is doing with water. Demand exceeds supply. The price to users is too low.

It would be simpler to let water prices rise to a market-clearing price. This would quickly reduce aquifer overdrafts, while leaving sufficient water to support ecosystems and the species they support. It would also mean that most Californians would see prices increase a lot.

2010-09-26:

There’s no black magic going on here, just basic math. Part of the problem is an ongoing 12-year drought that’s limiting inflow from snow melt in the Rockies. But, as seen throughout Lake Mead’s history, droughts come and go. The really worrying issue here is on the demand side. Decades of population growth have led to increased water demand in the Southwest. Take, for instance, Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead.

2011-12-14: Las Vegas and similar places have always been an abomination. With the water gone, this will become clear even to the dullest defender of sprawl.

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens – tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes – people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.

2012-07-31: All that constantly washing your car / sprinkling your pointless lawn / fountains in Vegas shit is coming down hard. I wonder if the massive relocation and water rationing can happen without a civil war.

The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years. Those conditions will become the “new normal” for most of the coming century.

2012-09-15:

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in 5 years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

2014-05-10:

Representatives from the US and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. More surprisingly, the 2 nations will join the team of environmental organizations to release a flood of 130b liters of water into the Delta’s ancient floodplain, and chase it with a smaller, permanent annual flow to sustain the ecosystem.

2015-01-07: What happens when the water table disappears. California hasn’t seen anything yet.

Only this isn’t the way the water went dry in Fairmead. No disrespect to the reverend, but the way it went dry is that 1 day last June, Annie Cooper was looking outside her kitchen window at another orchard of nuts going into the ground. This one was being planted right across the street. Before the trees even arrived, the big grower — no one from around here seems to know his name — turned on the pump to test his new deep well, and it was at that precise moment, when the water in his plowed field gushed like flood time, that the Coopers’ house went dry.

The kitchen faucet, the fancy bathtub, the washing machine, the toilet — all drew back into themselves. A last burble. Their old domestic well, sitting 85m deep, could no longer reach the plummeting aquifer, could no longer compete with the new farm wells sunk 100s of m deeper.

2015-02-12:

between 2050 and 2100, droughts in the Southwest and Great Plains will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries that wiped out the Pueblo Indians

2015-03-14: Let’s see whether California gets real, and innovates itself out of this situation. The alternatives are terrible.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

2017-05-07:

Bangalore has a problem: It is running out of water, fast. Cities all over the world, from those in the American West to nearly every major Indian metropolis, have been struggling with drought and water deficits in recent years. But Bangalore is an extreme case. Last summer, a professor from the Indian Institute of Science declared that the city will be unlivable by 2020. “The projections are relatively correct. Our groundwater levels are approaching 0.”

2015-05-11: Agriculture are water criminals

While California Is Dying Of Thirst so it’s good to see a summary that’s a lot better researched: if we wanted to buy out all alfalfa growers by paying them their usual yearly income to just sit around and not grow any alfalfa, that would cost $860m per year and free up 5.3t liter, ie pretty much our entire shortfall of 6t liter, thus solving the drought

2018-08-23:

Besides California, the other American place in water jeopardy is the High Plains, which sits on top of an aquifer called the Ogallala. The Ogallala is sometimes described as an ocean of groundwater. One of the largest known aquifers in the world, it runs from South Dakota to Texas, more or less in the shape of a monkey wrench. Near the top, in places, it is 300m deep, and at the lower end, in places, there are areas where it is as shallow as 1m. The Dust Bowl, which played out above the Ogallala, was, in a way, a period phenomenon. All the water necessary to sustain the crops that now cover the plains was always there, but 1m deeper than Depression-era farmers could reach with windmill pumps. Electric pumps, which only became widespread by the end of the thirties, made it accessible. For decades farmers thought the Ogallala was inexhaustible. By 1975 the amount of water taken each year from the aquifer equaled the flow of the Colorado River, and now the annual draw is ~18x that amount. Farmers have been pumping out 1-2m a year in places where 1cm is being added. As far as continuing to be useful, the Ogallala might be exhausted by 2070. A reasonable estimate is that it would take 6 ka for rain to replenish it.

2019-06-18:

During the summer, the Midwest will see drought conditions similar to what California, Greece, or Italy have. A mediterranean climate seems nice, as a concept: temperate winters and warm, dry summers, guaranteed to get you an even tan. If you’re a farmer trying to grow corn it means something very different: You need more water. Because the warmer the air is, the more water plants require.