capitalism *is* fun :-)

 
Reading through today’s news, something very interesting caught my attention.
Commercial prospector Ma’aden has invested $5.5 billion in equipment and development to prospects the sands of Saudi Arabia … for gold!

It appears that the sand in those deserts is nothing more then the topping of a huge sandwich consisting of various level of desired and expensive commodities, such as oil and gold. I wonder what’s next? Uranium?

People worrying that they will hit the bottom of the oil barrel soon, and run out of the good stuff, should rest assured. The bottom of the barrel is actually made from gold. They do have to sustain all the good life that was once built on crude oil, isn’t it?

I guess you know how oil reserves were formed. I am not going to explain it again. It’s not my fault you skipped school and missed this one.

Penguins don’t do anything all day long. They just sit there and get fat every day. Until they get so fat, that they can’t move there asses and freeze to death. Due to the extreme conditions in the arctic area, things happen at a faster pace, and all those billions of penguins died and got covered with snow. And this is how arctic oil was formed. In much larger quantities then oil which was formed from dead dinosaurs. Dinosaurs used to live long and didn’t get that fat, since they were running around all day after something to kill and eat.
This is how we are about to discover the largest crude oil field ever. And all we have to do, is drill into the snow. Which is easy.

It has taken governments, almost 100 years to figure this one out. Now, my dear readers, you might be wondering how such a discovery just happened. Who are the richest people on this planet? The Arabs. Why? Because they have all that oil to sell. But wait … actually it’s Santa Claus, who is the richest person on the planet. Being able to finance gifts for everyone, for hundreds of years. Offcourse he can. He has all that supply of arctic oil

And now we are about to invade Santa Clause to bring some democracy over there, and take away all his oil to be burned in our Hummers

I was reading the usual stuff this weekend (Bloomberg and a few more sites) and 2 things got my attention. One is about people’s greed and ingenious ways of making money, and the other is a good example of how to lower a car’s fuel usage, at the expense of innocent lives.

A new business in town will allow you to sell your life insurance to an "investor" in case there is nobody left to cash in your policy once you die. You get a nice amount of money in exchange, and they will continue to pay the premiums for you. Wonderful idea indeed. I wonder how long it will take until obscure little companies running this business, will hire the mob or other dubious characters, to help the person cash in the policy, a bit "sooner".
Capitalism is sick

On another article, the environmentalists started their usual protest, against a new European Union directive, which will require all cars to drive with their headlights on, all the time. According to the environmentalist, this will increase fuel usage by 5%. That is if you are driving a golf-cart. Has any of those green geniuses thought of actually experimenting this, since almost all cars have a trip computer which shows you your average fuel consumption?
Let’s do some math. A crappy little car engine has at least 50Kw of power. That is 50.000 watts. Turning the headlight on, uses at most, 200 watts. That is 0.4% … That’s 12.5 times less then what they claim.
I suggest that the EU should ban the usage of headlights at night. This will allow car manufacturers to lower the production costs since headlights won’t be needed, cars will get cheaper, and the amount you save, can be used to offset the high costs of gas. I am all in, for the environment’s sake.

I was reading some articles in the latest issues of NewsWeek when I stumbled across another great one. Again, the theory that when people are confronted with a serious issue, it’s easy to find some to blame it on, enact some penalty against the respective entity, feel happy at the end of the day that the one to blame has been punished, just to wake up the next day and find the problem is still there. No big deal! We will find someone else to blame and punish by the end of the day … and perhaps after a long period of overlooking the actual problem, and trying to use some creative thinking to solve it … we will start doing something. Here is the story:

Gas-stations are starting to ban the use of credit cards, to avoid paying a 10 cents fee for each gallon of gas paid with a credit-card (at $4 a gallon of gas). Credit card fees are up to 2% of the transaction amount. 2% out of $4 is 8 cents, but let’s bump it to 10 cents (price gouging?) to make MasterCard, Visa, American Express and others, look more guilty … shall we?

Let’s see all the "benefits" of banning credit cards:
- we save 8 cents on each gallon of gas we pay
- we start carrying around large amounts of cash with us. Very good thing. It will definitely help drive small crimes up, and justify some extra government spending on law enforcement.
- we will still pay cash advance fees at the ATM we use, and also, cash advances will carry an interest payment on your credit card, as opposed to POS payments, which carry to interest and offer a free credit for those that pay their credit card bill on time. You get to lose around 1% here.
- Factor in the extra hassle of finding and driving to (using expensive gas) an ATM machine or bank branch, to obtain cash.
- There are still a lot of scenarios that can happen, will happen and erode that great saving by a lot. You don’t have enough cash with you to fill up (since you are used to pay with your credit card for everything), and you will have to drive back again, to fill up your tank.
And many more.
Let’s do some math. I will take the best case scenario for you, the consumer.
Let’s assume you use 200 gallons of gas each month. You will save 2% from credit card fees which means $16.
You lose 1% at the very least, which drags down the total saving for you to $8.
Is it all worth it for a maximum of $8 you can save every month?

Think about for a second. Credit cards are product of free markets and capitalism. If there wouldn’t have been any benefits of using them, would have they become so widespread and accepted by everyone? I really don’t think so.

This reminds me of a story from my past. I was once discussing with a friend, about paying my bills. Instead of going to 5 different places to pay them, I use my internet banking service, pay a maximum of $5 in fees, and pay them all in 10 minutes. He argued with me that it was expensive, since I could just go and pay them with cash for free. No matter how hard I tried explaining him that at least $2 would have been the fee to withdraw that money from my bank account, plus factor in the cost of 5 trips to 5 places (I even considered 3 places to be within walking range, and only pay $2 for cheap public transportation to get to the other 2) … I am still only saving a maximum of $1, while wasting a lot of my time. I told him that the very best case scenario was saving half a dollar at expense of wasting a good portion of the day to walk around paying those bills. Still … he insisted that he was better of then me … with half a dollar

This is the kind of thinking we have to stop using. Overlooking good solutions for an issue we are facing, just because we are looking at an easy to apply and shortsighted solution right at hand … won’t get as anywhere.