The War in Ukraine

I have several suggestions and observations about the war in Ukraine.

1. Pres. Zelensky is a war leader and may not realize, but should certainly be reminded, that he has resources limited by forces beyond his control. This may even include the support of a war-weary citizenry.

2. As the war continues into winter it isn't so clear how it will proceed or how long it will take, though it is clear today that Ukraine should be able to win.

3. Russia will be loathe to end the war with the loss of Crimea. How long would that part of the war take and can Ukraine withstand war for that long? This is an unknown factor.

4. If the West were to reduce or cease support, then Ukraine would be in great danger and the war might take on a different dimension that nobody today wants.

 

Time for consideration of a shorter path to the end of this war

It's time for all the parties to consider another way to continue. I will suggest such a path. It begins with Pres. Zelensky offering to negotiate with Russia, but not with Putin (or his administration). If Russia accepts then here are suggested terms for the war to end. Russia and Ukraine agree to a cease fire during which Russia will remove its military from Ukraine, except Crimea. If this first step is begun successfully then both parties will have time to recover from the direct effects of the war. The negotiations would continue with Ukraine announcing that they will accept continued Russian occupation of Crimea under a leasing agreement. Negotiations on the leasing of Crimea and the return of any Ukrainian citizens from Russia to Ukraine would then begin. Both parties want these things, so presumably it might happen in a short period of time. Monies which Ukraine can receive from this leasing of Crimea would be welcomed in their rebuilding work. Once it is settled that there will be peace in exchange for continued use of Crimea, Russia must make the next step forward by announcing the retirement of Pres. Putin and his administration. This is key before negotiations involving reparation payments from Russia to Ukraine can be done. If the world were a more perfect place, Pres. Putin would be charged with War Crimes, but this appears not to be possible. Ukraine must accept that fact and simply work toward recovery of their country, restoration of it to good working order and in time normality.

This state of affairs: peace, reparations to Ukraine, retirement of Putin, continued Russian presence in Crimea in exchange for rent, these could have existed before the war and these remain necessary today.

If there are other factors which remain unknown to me, then they would be added to the negotiations where possible.

This framework is simple, but everyone knows that implementing it would not be as easy. Achieving the aim of secure nations must remain in mind.

Al-Zawahiri is Dead, Discussion on Reddit

On Inflation and the Economy

Here are links to some news stories from today about inflation. After
that I give the link to an article from WashingtonMonthly which is more
extensive and includes important history.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/which-us-refineries-have-shut-since-global-pandemic-why-2022-06-17/

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuelan-oil-cargo-eni-departing-supertanker-load-next-document-sources-2022-06-17/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-15/biden-willing-to-use-emergency-war-time-law-to-boost-gasoline

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-19/massive-oil-refining-capacity-idle-in-china-even-as-prices-soar

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-09/yellen-rejects-idea-corporate-greed-is-to-blame-for-inflation


https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/its-the-monopoly-stupid/


If you read these you will see that the Bloomberg and Reuters stories
explain what is happening NOW. That's the nature of "news". it's what is
"new". But, to understand our economic situation better you need some
historical perspective and it gives a very different impression. That's
where the WashingtonMonthly article finishes the puzzle.

That said, the WashingtonMonthly article is talking about economics and
not Russian influences on the Republican party and so many of the things
we see tied to Donald Trump. Still, it's a very good article with its
focus on the issue.


I have no idea why Janet Yellen would say corporate greed isn't the
issue. It is very much at the heart of the issue.

What About OIL ?

I'm going to review things to do with oil and gasoline prices. First, we start with some basic information. These charts are for the last 5 years. The recession is marked with the gray vertical bar on the graph.

Saudi Arabian Oil production (care of investing.com)

This seems to go up & down as the demand for oil fluctuates with economic activity. But, it still hasn't risen to pre-pandemic levels.

U.S. Crude Oil Production (care of investing.com)

This isn't entirely leveled-off. It's kept rising some, as the economy shows strength.

Crude Oil and Gasoline Prices (care of investing.com)

This seems to make no sense past about 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2022. Why have prices kept going up when production is leveled-off?

If prices had leveled off around there or a little before, say March 2022, then it would make sense. But, between January 24th and February 24th, Vladimir Putin decided to go to war in Ukraine and that caused oil to become much more in demand and higher priced. A lot of the world banned purchase of Russian oil and that shrank world supply.

Stock Market -- Dow Jones Index (care of money.cnn.com)

The DOW has done alright in recent years, with the big dip in 2020 being overcome by about the end of that year. It reached a peak in about October 2021 and it seems to be coming down now. Is this an indicator of where gasoline prices are going to go?

25 January 2022 -- OPEC and its Russia-led partners have promised to increase oil production to pre-pandemic levels this year but are falling short of those public commitments, stoking fast-rising global crude markets.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-russian-oil-output-increases-fall-short-of-promises-stoking-prices-11643108001

How much has world oil supply been reduced by cutting off Russian oil? One article said about 10%. Russia supplies a bit more than Saudi Arabia. And together they supply about 40% of the world's demand (20% each). Is Vladimir Putin practicing economics by having a war to raise demand for oil and cutting supply to the world to raise oil and gasoline prices?

Russia Invaded Ukraine 24 February 2022 (care of Wikipedia)

So much for Russia and OPEC increasing oil production (and in effect decreasing prices). What happened between January 25th and February 24th to convince Vladimir Putin to commit to war i Ukraine? Was he afraid of Ukraine developing natural gas which would supply Europe and reduce the value of Russian oil?

4 May 20?? -- Oil prices have soared. Why won't OPEC bring them down?  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61188579

/quote-from-article

In 2016, when oil prices were particularly low, Opec joined forces with 10 non-Opec oil producers to create Opec+.

Among them is Russia, which also produces over 10 million barrels a day.

Together, these nations produce about 40% of all the world's crude oil.

"Opec+ tailors supply and demand to balance the market," says Kate Dourian, of the Energy Institute. "They keep prices high by lowering supplies when the demand for oil slumps." Opec+ could also lower prices by putting more oil onto the market, which is what major importers like the US and UK want it to do.

Image source, AFP

/end-quote-from-article

It may seem trivial, but it would appear that the trend in America toward renewable energy supplies and away from oil have led the Saudis to put in charge a leader Salman who is happy to switch away from partnership with America and into a strange arrangement with Russia (Vladimir Putin for now). The murder of the journalist Khashoggi has also estranged Saudi Arabia from America and the fact-finding that Salman ordered the murder of Khashoggi has only pushed him away from America and toward Russia. With this new order of things, what are the economic reasons to produce more and keep prices low or steady? If America continues on this trend to replace oil/gasoline, then what might the OPEC+ countries do to harm us?

It seems more necessary than ever to see that Russia loses in Ukraine and that Putin is retired. Whether a replacement is more friendly to America or Europe is almost irrelevant. Perhaps the state of affairs in Saudi Arabia is more relevant since we have a standing defense relationship with them and we have sold them a lot of military equipment.

The transition from oil and other fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is going to take a while and will have many consequences. High gasoline prices and war in Ukraine are among them.

TRY HARDER -- People are feeling the stresses of Reaganomics

People are feeling the stresses of the Reaganomics economy. Pay doesn't go up very fast, but rent and other things do. It doesn't seem to touch the rich though. CEO pay is through the roof.

Sometimes you also see the counter-view, that people need to stop complaining and just do more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/ur188i/boomers_in_florida_who_voted_against_rent_control/

Learning to Speak Blue, and Beyond

I bought a cheap book ($4.00) at a local bookstore. It's about languages and what we learn from learning different languages. One early part of the book talks about the discovery in the 1800s of Homer's writings and the lack of any mention of BLUE. They apparently didn't have blue in the ancient world (circa 1200BC). Another person, Lazarus Geiger, who had studied and learned many languages discovered that this had also occurred in other people and other places around the world. As humans developed/evolved, this characteristic was revealed in writings because nobody mentioned blue or green and the order of their reveal was always the same. This gives rise to many questions and I presume today's scientists have those answers. DNA changed, rather than the sun's light and things like that. But, can you imagine never seeing blue, indigo, or violet? What was it like for humans going back even earlier. Supposedly mankind learned something about color around 23 million years ago. Before that, did we see shapes in shades of gray (black in various brightness levels from none to full white)? This makes me think the French idea of black and white, noir et blanc, as the same thing is probably a concept from ancient times. They do have different brightness levels and that means White is a shade of the black hue.

Being a person who thinks of chronology, though I am quite terrible at it sometimes, I also wondered what we will evolve next. Apparently we have red, green, and blue (remember tv sets were RGB), but there is something (butterflies?) with two more color perceivers and another thing, shrimp(?), with 16 more color perceivers  which would give us not just 16 more colors, but all the mixtures of those 16 (as red & yellow give us brown). There are among us some super color vision people who are like this. I saw one short video by a painter who lives in California and she has a fourth color perceiver. She is extremely sensitive to various colors.

Being a person who lets the mind wander, intentionally this time, I began to wonder about our other perception capabilities and which of those might evolve further. Is this just limited to perception of colors? Perhaps our sense of hearing or taste or other things will give us new capabilities. The book says that just in Homer's time they had begun to see green. The colors revealed themselves over time from red, yellow, green, and finally blue (remember the color spectrum acronym ROY G BIV from school?). What do we perhaps perceive in part today which might become much greater in the future. Do we need 16 more color perceivers or would that become a burden? Do we need to hear as well as a hound dog or would that just be a distracting thing?

It may be possible that we only develop capabilities when our experiences demand it and a random few have less or more capabilities. This is true with everything about us. Is a chess player more successful because of greater memory/recall capabilities and is there a point at which that becomes too cumbersome and a problem? Is there a point where intelligence becomes more of a waste of time than of real use to succeed?

Here is a short video on the topic that is easy to follow and quite informative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-WuBbVe2E

I certainly don't mean to write a book report, but so far I'm fascinated and looking forward to other things I may learn from learning French.

A Heat Engine -- thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell

This list of Green Energy or Environmentally Friendly stories is only because I think the TPV is a huge revelation and I wanted to post these links quickly. The other stories just continue to show the technological progress being made. Nuclear batteries is not a new idea, but this is the first story I've seen which shows they can and are being made. They aren't for all applications, but there are more and more situations requiring low energy, so they should be very valuable. Technologies to help us clean up waste from the older generation of high-quality lifestyles is just a plus.

The reason the TPV is such a big story is that in the past, even up to today, we have relied on energy from burnable sources (peat, coal, oil, natural gas) and nuclear fuels which all create heat and use that to spin a turbine that generates electricity. We haven't fully utilized the potential of the photoelectric effect to turn sunlight directly into energy. So, having centuries of experience with heat and having some new technologies to collect heat from sunlight, it has always been frustrating to not have a good way to turn heat into electricity. Like light to electricity, it is a major source which does not involve burning carbon-based fuels. NOW, we have a technology, the TPV, which can convert heat to electricity as efficiently as heat from burnt fuels heats gases, expands them, and spins a turbine. That's news!!!

Heat-driven photovoltaic device hits 40 percent efficiency | Ars Technica

This new device gets us closer to a decarbonized grid

Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste Into Diamond Batteries That Could Last For Thousands Of Years

A simple chemical twist turns plastic waste into a carbon-soaking sponge

March 29 marked the first time wind surpassed coal, nuclear power in lower 48

In a First, Wind Generation Tops Coal and Nuclear Power for a Day - Scientific American

--   Mark Hathaway

Renewable Energy and Storing Energy

Recharging profitability - Electrek.co

Saving money with solar - Elektrek.co

EV Charger prototype - Elektrek.co

Solar and battery = 60% of new planned developments - electrek.co

Lights will NOT go out - electrek.co

Startup turns unrecyclable plastic into giant indestructible construction bricks - Futurism.com

Stanford solar panel works at night - interestingengineering.com

US is energy-independent from petroleum - axios.com

Energy storage up to 18 years - euronews.com

Oil and Gasoline Prices -- updated

Information from: https://tradingeconomics.com

Oil price for the last 5 years

======================================================

Gasoline Price over the last 5 years:

The price of oil has come down 23 dollars / barrel.

The price of gasoline has come down 36 cents / gallon.

Perhaps much more impressive is that from the depths of the pandemic semi-depression, the prices skyrocketed far beyond recovering their pre-pandemic values -- beginning long before the November 2020 presidential election or the January 2021 swearing-in of the new president, Joe Biden.

3/15/22 Here is the new oil price graph:

 

 

It is sharply dropping from $102.12 down to $95.39 in only a few days. That's a $24.61 drop from its peak. Will it drop to other previous levels like $80 of 11/2021 ?