Jul
4
The correct proximity to fireworks
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | 1 Comment
I live in Wild West Waikiki and my lanai commands an excellent view of the fireworks show Hilton Hawaiian Village throws every Friday night just for me.
For some reason, however, I wasn’t content with this, and one Friday night I decided to drive to the end of the marina parking lot and put the top down and REALLY commune with the fireworks, which are set off from there.
This was a really dumb idea. It was painfully noisy, I had to crane my neck to see the fireworks, which were above me, and hot pyrotechnic detritus rained on me. What was I thinking?
What’s more, I could have figured this out simply by consulting my own childhood memories.
I grew up in a suburb on the southern side of Baltimore, Md. It took half an hour to drive into downtown Baltimore back then, but more than an hour to drive to Washington, D.C. So the logical place for the family to go to for Fourth of July fireworks was Ft. McHenry, in the middle of Baltimore harbor, the fort whose star-spangled banner withstood a night of British bombardment in the War of 1812 while an attorney named Francis Scott Key stood on the British warship taking notes that rhymed.
One year we got a place right down by the water, but the fireworks barge came unmoored and floated toward the shore, sending the crowd fleeing. We were rained on that night, too. Another year we were late, and when the fireworks started we were a mile from the fort in the middle of a railroad switching yard. Dad stopped the car and we watched from there, an excellent vantage point because we could see everything and we could see it lighting the fort besides. Furthermore, when the show was over we hightailed it back to the highway, beating everyone else and missing the usual traffic jam.
Closer is not better. This year we’ll view the fireworks from Mariposa restaurant and then walk home. I figure walking will be faster than driving.
Jul
3
There is a show on Deep Cable called “Ice Truckers” that portrays the dangerous dull lives of men who drive big rig trucks in tundra country on a road of ice. At any time they can die if their 18-wheeler breaks through the ice and sinks, or skids out of control and crashes.
But they keep doing it, and one gets the impression that most of them think the next guy to go to that big truck stop in the sky won’t be them because they drive better than the others do.
This is an extreme example of a phenomenon we see a lot — people in dangerous jobs can lose the ability to realize how dangerous their jobs are.
In “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe described how military test pilots, losing a brother pilot to a crash, always found a way to persuade themselves that the crash was caused by pilot error, and after that to persuade themselves that the pilot didn’t have the right stuff to be a pilot, and doomed by having inferior abilities or character flaws that made flying more dangerous for him than for the other pilots. Wolfe concluded that the pilots needed to believe this — that their jobs were safe if done properly — because otherwise how could they justify the job to their wives and children?
I think Wolfe was onto something, but I also think it’s reinforced by a more banal factor, that people in dangerous jobs become inured to the risks because they live with those jobs day after day, growing used to the risks. Each day that nothing goes wrong reinforces the feeling of safety, even if they have no wives and children demanding to know why they work in a dangerous profession.
In Washington, D.C., I knew several people who lobbied for the nuclear power industry and had worked in nuclear power plants, and all of them were utterly convinced that concerns about the safety of nuclear power were completely unfounded, even after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pa., caused by inattentive workers, and even after the far worse incident at Chernobyl, on the border of Ukraine and Russia. These incidents were anamolies, these people believed, caused by resolvable training issues. Normal people realize that the sanguine attitude of nuclear power proponents, their serene confidence that nuclear power plant accidents need never happen, is an example of the attitude that causes such events.
Hawaii has a thriving agribusiness of genetically modified seed, and it’s probably pretty safe. But the people who agreed to plant windbreak trees on Molokai and then didn’t, sent a message to the rest of us that they’re too sanguine about the safety of what they do.
The oil industry is trying to leverage the oil price crisis to revisit decisions on environmentally sensitive areas where oil companies are forbidden to drill. In theory it should be possibly to drill safely on the tundra, or off the California coast. In that regard, the oil companies are right.
The problem is that oil people are so convinced that what they do is safe that they’re not always as careful as they should be. It’s hard to argue that you can drill safely on the tundra when BP allowed its Alaskan pipeline to leak vast amounts of oil.
I’d like to believe companies can do their work safely. The problem is that time and again we get shown that many don’t bother.
Jul
3
Blame game on the price of oil
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | Leave a Comment
Three factors are driving the price of oil up, but people connected with each want to downplay their factor and blame the other two.
To refresh your memory, these are the three factors:
1. Demand for oil.
2. Demand for oil futures contracts.
3. The falling value of the dollar.
The sheiks say the current run-up has more to do with institutional investors buying oil futures than with demand for actual oil.
The institutional investors say their role is manini and point fingers at demand and the fact that oil is a dollar-denominated commodity.
The treasury secretary says the decline of the dollar is not a major factor and blames lack of new oil production.
All of this is misleading. All three factors are in play.
We like to demonize Arab oil states so it may be hard to swallow, but the sheiks come closest to the truth when they say that they are pumping as much oil as their customers require.
As I mentioned in a recent post, the price of oil has risen many more times than the actual increase in oil consumption. This is all the proof we need that there are other factors in play.
Oil states are pointing to the other factors for public relations reasons — they don’t wish to be any more unpopular than they are already.
Institutional investors prefer not to believe they are having that much effect because what they’re doing is spun as evil — the word “speculation” has a whiff of criminality about it, or at the very least, recklessness — and one recently emailed me to point out that prices are rising just as much for oil that is not traded on commodity markets. He’s right, but it doesn’t exculpate “speculators.” That’s like saying you’re not responsible for filling the ice tray because you only poured water into one cube. It is absolutely true that demand for futures contracts has led to higher oil prices.
Treasury Secretary Paulsen now weighs in, denying the role of the weak dollar. The dollar has depreciated 25% since 2002, he says, while oil has risen more than 500%.
Okay, suppose the dollar has fallen 25%. (Against what? Let’s assume he means, against the average of other key currencies, or something else sensible. For purposes of simplifying the math, let’s just assume the dollar has fallen 25% against a mythical currency X that we will consider a benchmark.)
If the dollar has depreciated 25%, then it takes one third more money, in dollars, to buy now what you could buy in 2002 for the same price. Something that cost $100 in 2002 would cost $233 now. This is an argument in FAVOR of the assertion that currency exchanges are a factor, not an argument against.
The reason Paulsen is trying to focus attention away from factors other than supply is that the current administration is friendly to oil companies and sees the current situation as an opportunity for a fresh attempt to ease restrictions on drilling for oil in prohibited areas.
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