Mod+ The Crisis in Ukraine

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Dyrnwyn said:
for inflation not being a problem, I guess that depends on how it's defined. I don't think it is necessarily a problem at the 10'000 foot view/structural level, but at the level of the average consumer, yes, it's a problem.
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Agreed. It is very much of an issue. I think the reasons behind that detour out of the war discussion pretty far, but suffice to say we are not well set up for dealing with the shocks of these events. That’s sort of a failing on our part - too brittle.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
I am more than willing to pay more for gas to stop people from getting bombed to death.
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But are you willing to pay more because people think that people getting bombed to death is going to have a big impact when mathematically it shouldn’t? Inflation breeds inflation they say :smile:

I would be quite happy to pay my tax dollars to stop people from getting bombed for sure.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
I am more than willing to pay more for gas to stop people from getting bombed to death.
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How much are you willing to pay? What if gas were $10 a gallon?

It’s not a facetious question and I wouldn’t ever want to minimize what’s going on in the Ukraine. My wife and I are kind of buffered from this because she doesn’t drive that much and my commute is short. In the Boston area where we are a lot of people work in town and live in the ‘burbs. If you drive an hour both ways, that’s a huge hit, even if you get 30 miles to the gallon.
 
Endless Flight said:
How much are you willing to pay? What if gas were $10 a gallon?

It’s not a facetious question and I wouldn’t ever want to minimize what’s going on in the Ukraine. My wife and I are kind of buffered from this because she doesn’t drive that much and my commute is short. In the Boston area where we are a lot of people work in town and live in the ‘burbs. If you drive an hour both ways, that’s a huge hit, even if you get 30 miles to the gallon.
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I suppose it's a question everyone has to ask themselves. How much am I willing to sacrifice so that strangers might live?
 
Giganotosaurus said:
I suppose it's a question everyone has to ask themselves. How much am I willing to sacrifice so that strangers might live?
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What they should be asking themselves is "How much am I willing to sacrifice to get Europe to buy more American Oil and Natural Gas".
 
i think the crazy thing about this war in this day and age is how it is showing us we are all connected - reinforced, of course, by the events of the last couple of years and magnified by the internet and instant communication.
 
There's the short and long term. Short term it's a pain to gain question. How much pain can/will I take and what do I think the gain will be? People might willingly pay double for gas for two months if they perceive it removes war in Europe for a decade or two. If you can avoid your country going into active war and economic war seems much more efficient. You get systems developed to more efficiently use resources, you don't expend as many finite resources and fewer people die.

Long term you work to be either much less interconnected, more self reliant and have larger buffers (less Just in time supply, more warehouses) or so highly integrated that other trade partner becomes effectively part of your group(E.U.)
 
CRKrueger said:
What they should be asking themselves is "How much am I willing to sacrifice to get Europe to buy more American Oil and Natural Gas".
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I'd ask "How much are we willing to sacrifice to keep oil and gas companies rich?"
Get off the oil and gas and the leverage (and much wealth) countries like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran have is gone.
Alas we didn't learn our lesson from the oil embargo in the '70s doubt we will learn it now.

Personally willing to sacrifice a lot to help Europe because it helps me and is the right thing to do. Although it's not like I have a choice, the price of oil and gas is based on world markets, so even if one drop of US oil never gets to Europe, the price I pay will be jacked up even though the cost of production in the US hasn't risen one cent. When does that go from supply/demand economics and become profiteering is for the oil lobby to decide it seems.
 
I suspect that gas prices hurt us far more than the sanctions will hurt Putin. His tanks need gas too. I suspect he's hoping his war will jumpstart the Russian economy and he hopes to make Russia more self sufficient. If he can build his co-prosperity sphere of influence he wants to be less dependent on selling stuff to the west. I've got a lot of worst case nightmare scenarios in my mind, not the least of which is Russia burning everything as they withdraw and using the nuclear power plants to salt the earth behind them causing the displacement of 40 million Ukrainians and a massive world wide wheat shortage.
 
Dyrnwyn said:
I think whatever measures the administration takes to counteract higher gas prices will determine what the reaction is like. There's already a lot of pressure to increase domestic production, and if that's approved, it will go a long way towards how people in the US end up feeling about this. There was already significant inflationary pressure before this, and it's become a political liability for the administration.

However, if the response is just telling people to buy electric cars (looking at you, Buttigieg)...yeah, good luck with that.
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Except there are plenty of drill permits not being used, so the lack of domestic production is on the oil companies, not the government. The government is not at fault here. Fox tried to play that card, and got schooled

Why the oil companies are letting 9000 drilling permits go unused makes no sense, and that is on them.
 
urbwar said:
Why the oil companies are letting 9000 drilling permits go unused makes no sense, and that is on them.
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That totally makes sense. Oil prices plummeted during the pandemic - not a good time to start new projects. The two weeks of war isn't enough time for big shifts in production.
 
Reuters posted this article about Americans donating ammo, body armor and firearms for Ukraine, and some of the hurdles they've run into
 
Stan said:
That totally makes sense. Oil prices plummeted during the pandemic - not a good time to start new projects. The two weeks of war isn't enough time for big shifts in production.
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Demand did go up as states started to reopen though, so some of those could have been used. The entire country hasn't been in lockdown for some time now
 
urbwar said:
Why the oil companies are letting 9000 drilling permits go unused makes no sense, and that is on them.
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That's a fair question. But as I understand it, the permit just means they can try to drill somewhere, and it doesn't necessarily mean the site is viable. Plus, there are all of the other regulations still in play (which the companies might try to get dialed back).
 
urbwar said:
Demand did go up as states started to reopen though, so some of those could have been used. The entire country hasn't been in lockdown for some time now
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So NPR I believe did a thing on this I think and it came down to the spot price of oil is way up but the futures price is not as high going out into the future. So the expected price the oil companies would get for the oil by the time they could get the oil online is not high enough to justify the risk. They had one oil crash recently followed by years of hating on oil and gas so they are very gunshy of bringing on production unless the case for return is very rosy. They're also dealing with the labor shortages and fatigue from the boom bust nature of the oil drilling business. The jobs are less wildly lucrative than they were 2 years ago because wages are going up all over. Maybe you get paid a bit less in small town X but it's stable and your wife and kids are stable and happy. Working in boomcity Y may pay a lot more but housing is expensive and you gotta move the wife and kids AGAIN..
So short thing is it's not as guaranteed money as it looks like.9
 
Dyrnwyn said:
That's a fair question. But as I understand it, the permit just means they can try to drill somewhere, and it doesn't necessarily mean the site is viable. Plus, there are all of the other regulations still in play (which the companies might try to get dialed back).
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True, but again, that is on them, not the government. As Psaki stated in that exchange I linked to, there are no Federal Policies in place that is preventing them from doing anything with those permits/sites. So any shortages or price increases is on the oil companies
 
urbwar said:
Except there are plenty of drill permits not being used, so the lack of domestic production is on the oil companies, not the government. The government is not at fault here. Fox tried to play that card, and got schooled

Why the oil companies are letting 9000 drilling permits go unused makes no sense, and that is on them.
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This is only partially true at best. Federal permits are the start of the permitting process and no where near the end. They still need to get all the other permitting approvals which can take years. I wouldn't call them getting schooled. As far as I can tell no one is being honest.
 
Between the oil and grain prices rising we've got a local political leader around here who's going to be sending Vladimir Putin thank you and Christmas cards this year and a valentine next year. It's a bit disgusting but also too political to go into detail here.

Really, though, right now the price hikes are speculative it'll be about a month until the actual supply issues start to be felt. It's hard to say whether the actual prices will wind up higher or lower than what we're seeing now. There are lots of suppliers who have been holding back on supplies that could be openned up. American shale gas actually waits for the price to hit certain break points before turning on the taps and OPEC tries to control prices by controlling supply so, there should be some mitigation over the long term.
 
In the why we can't have nice things category I'm now starting to see stories of Russian-American (immigrant owned) businesses receiving threats from idiots as well as large drops in patronage. Ironically many "Russian" restaurants are not even run by Russian immigrants, but people from ex-USSR satellite states Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania etc.

I saw the same after 9/11 where an Afghani restaurant in Berkeley changed their sign from Afghan cuisine to cuisine of Kashmir. Berkeley of all places.

I guess any excuse to hate. :sad:
 
Bunch said:
This is only partially true at best. Federal permits are the start of the permitting process and no where near the end. They still need to get all the other permitting approvals which can take years. I wouldn't call them getting schooled. As far as I can tell no one is being honest.
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Once the Bureau of Land Management grants a permit, drillers do not need another one from them (unless the lease expires or two years goes by, which ever comes first). There's inspections that are required, and depending on those inspections, a permit could be denied/revoked, but nothing I've seen (I did look up the requirements on the Land Management website). If there's local permits required, that should be a local issue, not a federal one. If I'm missing something, please direct me to more information so I can get see the whole picture better.
 
David Johansen said:
Between the oil and grain prices rising we've got a local political leader around here who's going to be sending Vladimir Putin thank you and Christmas cards this year and a valentine next year. It's a bit disgusting but also too political to go into detail here.

Really, though, right now the price hikes are speculative it'll be about a month until the actual supply issues start to be felt. It's hard to say whether the actual prices will wind up higher or lower than what we're seeing now. There are lots of suppliers who have been holding back on supplies that could be openned up. American shale gas actually waits for the price to hit certain break points before turning on the taps and OPEC tries to control prices by controlling supply so, there should be some mitigation over the long term.
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Certainly anyone with an operating well and excess capacity could start ramping up production. I think some of the problem is that many of the current producers are hostile to the US at the moment. I think we still have sections on Venezuela where we used to get a lot of oil(we switched to Russia from them I recall). The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is not happy with our criticisms of him. Iran may still be under factions so that's not helping.

Shale is expensive to operate but has come down.
urbwar said:
Once the Bureau of Land Management grants a permit, drillers do not need another one from them (unless the lease expires or two years goes by, which ever comes first). There's inspections that are required, and depending on those inspections, a permit could be denied/revoked, but nothing I've seen (I did look up the requirements on the Land Management website). If there's local permits required, that should be a local issue, not a federal one. If I'm missing something, please direct me to more information so I can get see the whole picture better.
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Local permits are what I was referring to. Federal approval is just one part of the permitting process and saying having that means you can go drill is no accurate. So yes it's not the Feds in particular holding up drilling but it's also not a license to just run free and still once you have one permit. I tried to repair a section of my dock a tree fell on and I learned real quick what a mess that whole thing is.
 
Bunch said:
Local permits are what I was referring to. Federal approval is just one part of the permitting process and saying having that means you can go drill is no accurate. So yes it's not the Feds in particular holding up drilling but it's also not a license to just run free and still once you have one permit. I tried to repair a section of my dock a tree fell on and I learned real quick what a mess that whole thing is.
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Gotcha. From what I understand, the majority of these unused permits are for federal land; would local permits still be required for that? I know there's inspection and such that have to take place, but I thought being on federal land only required federal permissions
 
urbwar said:
Gotcha. From what I understand, the majority of these unused permits are for federal land; would local permits still be required for that? I know there's inspection and such that have to take place, but I thought being on federal land only required federal permissions
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Not sure.
 
Toadmaster said:
In the why we can't have nice things category I'm now starting to see stories of Russian-American (immigrant owned) businesses receiving threats from idiots as well as large drops in patronage. Ironically many "Russian" restaurants are not even run by Russian immigrants, but people from ex-USSR satellite states Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania etc.

I saw the same after 9/11 where an Afghani restaurant in Berkeley changed their sign from Afghan cuisine to cuisine of Kashmir. Berkeley of all places.

I guess any excuse to hate. :sad:
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That's predictable but awful. Generally, immigrants have nothing do with the current government and are often opposed to it enough that they left their country.
 
Toadmaster said:
In the why we can't have nice things category I'm now starting to see stories of Russian-American (immigrant owned) businesses receiving threats from idiots as well as large drops in patronage. Ironically many "Russian" restaurants are not even run by Russian immigrants, but people from ex-USSR satellite states Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania etc.
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It makes my blood boil but I knew something like this was bound to happen. Anaheim is home to thousands of Arab-Americans and there was a surge of hate crimes post 9/11.
 
Freedom Fries all over again. I was in NYC in the mid 2000s for work during this. I went to Ellis Island, and lo and behold, a whole display on liberty cabbage. I was astonished at how little we had learned.
 
A bunch of local stores have dumped all their Russian made alcohol. They put up signs saying that some alcohol has a Russian name, but is not made in Russia so that's why it's still for sale.
 
When I started the thread, I wanted to keep the topic to the war in Ukraine but understood at times that there might be an occasional drift into politics, which as everyone knows, is against Pub rules. I’ve given quite a bit of leeway in how people post because I understand the gravity of the situation and how people get emotional, and rightly so.

However, we have still gotten quite a few reports on this thread very recently and I have to ask that we please try to keep the thread very focused on Ukraine and not other topics, which may or may not be tangentially related. With that said, I want to thank everyone so far who has participated. The Pub is the gold standard for signal to noise ratio on any topic and I think this should be noted as I ask for everyone to keep their focus narrow in this thread.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
The Associated Press did an interesting article on foreign volunteers in the Ukrainian military: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-d0243a1708a3115e5ad0ac40aed99b9f
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There are Indians who have joined; one was a 21 year old college student who was in Ukraine attending university. What's interesting is that by doing so, they can be charged under Indian law, as it is illegal for them to join another nation's military: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/sto...ing-army-karti-chidambaram-1922723-2022-03-09
 
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