Japan and Oil

Japan:
News outlets have an incentive to be sensational. I remember in the summer of 2001 there were months of reports about the increase in shark attacks. It seemed like the end of the beach. There were actually materialized responses. Beaches were closed occasionally, and tourism was seriously impacted. It was exactly this time I realized 24-hour news networks were bastards.

It was pretty sad watching them find the most fearful of ways to spin the earthquake in Japan. The nuclear reactors were quickly fixed upon, and the risk level is currently teetering around the end of Tokyo.

Quite messed up that these networks actually have enough influence to overrule Japanese nuclear engineers who have been doing their jobs for decades.

Of course anything could happen, but these networks make it nearly impossible to get a clear idea of what is really happening, especially since their bullshit reports actually get real responses.

Anyhow, the immediate economic impacts are these:
Massive monetary shift.
International pledges of support.
That means probably a trillion dollars will be spent on bonds. An imaginary promise of money in the future. May have been better spent on materials and services.

Mid-term questions:
Japanese energy.

Long term questions:
Japanese consumer.

Oil:
Has the price of gas tripled in 10 years? A few months ago I randomly found the video bellow that has a sub-topic of "maximum oil production". Today, after watching oil futures hover over $100 a barrel, I decided to look for more information on the topic. Turns out there is a fancy term for "maximum oil production", it's "Peak Oil". There are tons of articles and videos about it. Sadly, the majority of them have a 24-hour news aftertaste. Sensational overload. Hard to decipher whats real and what's not. Personal opinions and lack of facts make the overall selection of information total garbage. Most of the people who focus on the fears of it usually use a synonym of apocalypse within three sentences. I wouldn't be surprised if half of these articles received heavy funding from futures exchanges, or investors who own massive amounts of oil contracts.

The fear mongerers almost had me going for a while. Luckily I remembered the video below. Some boring ass college arithmetic lecture. The lecture has a lot of overlap with the sensationalized articles, but is not at all sensational. The professor clearly has a personal point of view that people are going to face hard times once maximum oil production is past, but he keeps it cool, and never says anything like Apocalypse. His plan seems to be growing some crazy ass sideburns and moving to the mountains. Seems like a pretty good plan.

Sideburns