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Thursday, June 24, 2010

A letter from a Mexican Friend

The following letter was sent to me by a Mexican friend four years ago. I stumbled onto it again a week ago and thought it had some interesting insights that I wanted to share. So, here it goes.


To my American friend,

I have been seeing a lot of e-mails that my friends from the US keep sending me about the price of gasoline. Most of them try to make others to boycott a particular company’s gasoline. This, of course will never work, since we all use gasoline every day and simply cannot go completely without. But, I was reading Fortune magazine, and it said that the high gasoline prices had lessened demand in the US by 1% over the previous year. This is exactly what simple economics says will happen; as prices rise, people will buy less and even try to find substitutes. So, people combine trips to the market, or buy a car that gets more miles for the gallon of gasoline.

I also want to let my American friends know that there are some things that they can do that would have an immediate and dramatic impact on the gasoline price.

1. Have your US President Bush, promise to the world to never use atomic weapons. This was the former policy of America, but Mr. Bush has been ambiguous about using atomic weapons against Iran. This makes futures markets very unsure, which is reflected in prices of oil going up. The world might believe Mr. Bush’s no atomic weapons promise, especially if he gives up his idea of restarting atomic bombs testing in Nevada. This really scares we people outside of America.

2. Mr. President Bush should also reassure the UN and the world that diplomacy and only diplomacy will be used in dealing with Iran. As we say in México, “No juegues con fuego, porque te puedes quemar”. Don’t play with fire because you can be burned. The Iran people have threatened to close the Hormuz Straits, if the Americans try any military adventure in Iran. This, my American friends would make gasoline $10 the gallon.

3. Tell Jack Daniels to keeps making whiskey and not fuel for cars. The Energy Bill of 2005 that your Congress passed last year, makes refiners use ethanol instead of MTBE as an “oxygen” fuel. Well, there isn’t enough ethanol in the world to mix with gasoline that Americans use each day. But, maybe I could talk to my friends at José Cuervo. Maybe American Congress could make refiners add tequila to gasoline for “oxygen” fuel. (but no worm, of course) Without joking, your American Congress just likes to make subsidies for the red state friends that grow corn and make whiskey. Write a letter and tell them to stop the corn subsidies.

4. Mr. Ben Bernanke at the Bank of Federal Reserve of US is a little loco, as they say down here. He said this, "The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation." Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan have created so much dollars out of thin air that, of course, gasoline and just about everything else cost more. This, my American friends, is called inflation, an increase in the money supply, and it does exactly what Mr. Bernanke says it does, “raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.” Even Hugo Chavez knows that a falling dollar means he needs to get more of them for a barrel of Venezuelan oil. Mr. Chavez should call Bernanke “Mr. Danger.” Buy gold, that will show Mr. Money Machine Bernanke the worth of his play green money.

5. The US strategic petroleum reserve functions as a black hole. The US government buys oil on the open market and puts it back into holes in the ground in case of emergency. This means that my American friends are competing to purchase oil against their own government using their own tax money. Also, the uncertainty of the use of all that oil again makes oil futures uncertain and adds a premium to oil prices. Write your Congressman and demand an end to the strategic petroleum reserve, and sell the oil at prevailing rates.

6. I know my American friends don’t want to hear this, but the war in Iraq has also caused gasoline prices to rise. All those helicopters, airplanes, tanks, and trucks use a lot of petroleum which the army must buy on the global market. That means less gasoline for your cars. I won’t go into the war itself since that is a sensitive subject, but you know what they say in México, “cada quien se labra su destino”.

I hope this helps. I know it is hard to change the status quo, but every Mexican knows that government is not his friend, but my American friends think their government is holy, but in fact, it is Congress and Mr. Bush and Bernanke that have made gasoline prices so high.

Sinceramente,

Guillermo Tomás Reyes C.

Mercado Analista Global
Petróleos Mexicanos
Marina Nacional #329,
Col. Huasteca, C. P. 11311, México D. F.
(+52 55) 1944 2600
greyesc@dfc.pemex.c

om

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Spiral Jetty

The spiral jetty is a work of art created in the Great Salt Lake in Rozel Bay. It was built in 1970 by Robert Smithson. I've only ever seen it from the air. I don't know if I would invest the time to drive to see it. When I flew over it 8 years ago, it was nearly submerged, but now, as you can see, it is high and dry. Enjoy.














ChuckECheese


Have you seen the obverse of the new pennies? The first thing that I thought of was ChuckECheese. The new pennies look cheesy and cheap. But, hey they are cheap.

US currency has lost 95% of it's value since 1913, the year the FED was created. Don't believe me? Check here for yourself. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Most empires are wrecked on the shoals of financial looseness. Will the US be any different? I can think of 13 trillion reasons why not.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Spelunking Behind the Dryer

The clothes dryer hadn't been doing its job well for quite a while, but I was hesitant to go spelunking behind it to clean out the vent. I knew it would be a nasty, unpleasant job to clean out the flex hose and the 20 plus feet of ducting between the dryer and the great outdoors.



So, I picked up some supplies at Home Depot to get started with the job. I found these nifty clamps that can be tightened by hand, because I knew that it would be a challenge to get the vent hose back in place once I got it cleaned out. I didn't want to disconnect the gas line to pull the dryer completely away from the wall, so I knew it would also be in cramped quarters.


I got behind the dryer and disconnected the old vent flex hose. It was completely packed with lint! This led me to Wal-Mart to get a new 5 foot piece of vent flex hose, since the nearest Home Depot is 25 miles away. While there, I also picked up a 10 foot dryer vent brush that Home Depot didn't carry. I know because I asked when I was buying the clamps a few days earlier.

I proudly arrived home with my purchases and was quickly cleaning out the permanent ducting and installing the new flex hose with the thumb screw clamps when this happened.

A few choice words later and I was calling to my son to bring the digital camera to document the hidden design feature of the new clamps. Don't get me wrong, the thumb screw clamps are a great idea, but it was completely foreseeable that the sharp tail of the clamp would be directly under the thumb screw as the user tightened the clamp. Thus, posing a risk of cutting the fingers of the user.

The whole advantage of the clamp allows the user to tighten it without a screwdriver while in cramped quarters. This also makes it possible to tighten the clamp without being able to see one's fingers in harm's way.

So, Ideal Clamp, do the clamp one better without the Ginsu feature. Put a guard over the pigtail to protect the user's digits.

(PS. Maybe in a future blog I will address the ancestry of the appliance designer who put the recessed dryer vent 2 inches off the floor right next to the gas line, making it virtually impossible to clean the vent hose regularly/ever?)

A Blast from the Past

I remembered I had these slides that I got from my Dad. He got them from an open house at Edwards AFB while he was serving a mission in Southern California. I thought they were rather historical, so I wanted to share them.













Friday, June 4, 2010

Cold Fusion


This year marks the 21st anniversary of the announcement of Cold Fusion, of which volumes have been written, mostly defamatory of Pons, Fleischmann, and the dead graduate student.

He is known as the dead graduate student because the radiation from the cold fusion cell at the power density levels claimed by P & F, would have killed him, if the reaction followed the conventional hot fusion rules. Hot fusion, by the way, most have been misled to believe, is low in radiation - nonsense!

I followed CF for sometime and even went and spoke with Steven Jones, while I was a student at BYU. He was pretty dismissive of a lowly undergraduate student, but those were the heady days were deaths threats to the researchers were not unknown. So, maybe he was having a bad day.

The Dead Graduate Student, on the other hand, is very friendly and personable. Thus, in my opinion, as mortals, P, F and the dead graduate student may have been mistaken, but after spending $100,000 (in 1989 dollars) of their own baksheesh, I would be the last to accuse them of fraud.

And, yes, I do hold out the hope of one day understanding what the phenomenon was all about and maybe some Newton-like genius from China or India will day reproduce it at will and package it for sell at Wal-mart. (Now, that should strike fear into the hearts of every WWF, Greenpeace, and Club of Rome misanthrope.)