[theluckycountry]

Last months prices
WTI Crude Oil $94
Brent Crude $97

This month
WTI Crude Oil $75
Brent Crude $79

And this is with Russia and Saudi Arabia dialing back production.

The Saudi kingdom’s oil sector contracted by 17.3% year-on-year in the third quarter — the most on record for any quarter since at least 2011 — because of the voluntary oil production cuts, aimed at shoring up global prices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/03/econ ... index.html

Saudi Arabia, Russia to continue additional voluntary oil cuts
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 023-11-05/

The high interest rates are to blame no doubt, causing curbs in consumption.

Higher interest rates have caused oil prices to fall in the past as it translates to less demand for oil as activity declines with higher costs, slowing the economy. On 3 May, for example, oil prices fell 4% after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates as investors fretted about the economy.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/inter ... C61oN2fk3a

First the GFC occurs, at the same time as conventional oil peaks in production. Global economies contract. Followed by a long slow recovery, then just as the wheels are turning properly again, "Covid" strikes and decimates economies again. We begin to recover from that and global central banks start hiking interest rates ever higher, causing another sump in economic activity. It's starting to look obvious that the plan to deal with peak oil is to keep creating economic disasters. Covid wasn't an economic disaster, it was the flu, and the response to it was to create an economic disaster.

[theluckycountry]

Still below $80 and the Saudi's are cutting Another 1 million per day. Where is the demand? It's not there is it. Impoverished people don't consume a lot of oil

[Pops]

COVID aside, the economy has been on life support since the DotCom bust, maybe longer. We've been hooked to the Fed's tubes as they pumped in the cash. How else could stocks sell for 30-40x earnings—or sky high prices on NO earnings? Home prices appreciate by 10-20-50% yearly?

Bitcoin?
NFTs?
Old pickups?

LOL. I don't know if I'm just a doomer or what but it seems sureal these last 20 years. The only thing that I expected to happen that did was the GFC
I try to move along while at the same time being ready for the End at any moment. I've certainly given up prognostication. My feeling is we'll walk into decline and all act surprised (so I have all cash, free/clear home, PV and building an e-bike)
Or, we'll electrify so quickly that demand WILL peak befor supply and oil will be cheap (and I'll drive around in my old diesel beast pulling the trailer and looking at windmills)).

[theluckycountry]

For a lot of us older folk pops, who have retired, own a home, and don't spend all that much, the changes of the last decade or so are not all that evident. If you were in your early thirties though with 3 kids and mortgage...

Grid Solar eradicated my power bills and gave me a passive income of a couple of thousand a year which was nice. I hardly drive anywhere now, most of my travels being joy rides for the day on a motorcycle. A neighbor though is spending $200 a week in fuel alone commuting to a job 100 km away. And he's building sheds on his property and doing renovations inside, hundreds of thousands in total, I'm past all that thankfully.

I remember reading an article about the great depression, many subsistence farmers didn't even know they were in one because they never had any money to spend in the first place and when the jobs disappeared there was no difference. It's a bit like that for us hey. The old age pension, while it lasts, will pay the land rates and buy food etc and any luxuries can come out of the life savings.

[Pops]

Money was free all thru the teens, got us cheap fracked gas/oil that spawned plastic everything from the methane drippings and gave PO a reprieve, gave most everyone a 2-3% mortgage that has crippled the market today, it blew bubbles in the bubbles—Gamestop to trump NFTs to bitcoin pyramids in the billions.

To me everything financial is unrecognizably distorted—though admittedly I'm no expert. The coming of the great recession was obvious to me however. When someone working for me bought a house with nothing down, no employment verification and worthless credit way back in 2003 I knew something was wrong. But from the bank bailouts (and subsiquent bonus parties) on, nothing has made much sense.

And politics these last 10 years is just as nonsensical. I mean I have come to conclusions in my own mind for some of the crazy, but what it points to I really don't know. I took advantage of the easy money in my own little way and we have a little cash and some equity but I'm torn between hunkering down here in the depths of trump-town or selling and going mobile.

I'm no spring chicken but still in good shape for the shape I'm in, I feel like maybe 10 good years or so being relatively active and don't really want to ride the couch into the sunset. We'll see what the winter brings.

[theluckycountry]

I took advantage of the easy money in my own little way and we have a little cash and some equity but I'm torn between hunkering down here in the depths of trump-town or selling and going mobile.

Gypsies have a fun time in the good times but when things get tough, war, depression, the last place I would want to be is on the road. I couldn't imagine being welcome, I think of the Okies of the depression era, they were herded into camps basically. Then there is access to fuel, you need fuel to be mobile don't you. There are lots of RVs parked up around he nation now, in groups by the highways, in small encampments on crap land out in the boonies. It's a crap-shoot if you don't have a good nest egg behind you.

Down here we have them, Grey Nomads they are called and they spend most of their life in dusty showgrounds or "free camps" that come with a drop toilet if you're lucky. I often stop at one showground on my rides and have a smoke and a chat with whoever is about. Some are quite happy being endlessly on the road while others are stuck there waiting for the pension payment so they can fuel up and drive on to the next dusty campground. Not my kind of lifestyle but each to their own hey.

[Pops]

Gypsies have a fun time in the good times but when things get tough, war, depression, the last place I would want to be is on the road.

You're exactly right. I've always said that hunkering is better than bugging because at least at home you have privileges and theoretically at least, legal protection. And, my folks were DBOs (ditch bank okies) which is likley where I get my hoarding tendencies.

My indecision is whether to hunker down for a storm (here in the middle of the likely path) or hitch up my britches and go out and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts... sorta speak.

[theluckycountry]

My indecision is whether to hunker down for a storm (here in the middle of the likely path) or hitch up my britches and go out and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts... sorta speak.

Yes, tough decision... Easy when you're young lol. It's a shame politics has such sway over there, it shouldn't matter who is in power federally as far as where you live. It doesn't here, state laws effect more than anything but even they are pretty homogeneous. I certainly don't plan to move, I chose my spot at length based on demographics, distance from cities, access to water and locally grown food, crime rate, proximity to bugout routes into the back country and even proximity to nuclear targets and the prevailing winds.

It was a big shopping list and I thought I would have to make sacrifices but I even ended up with a town that is well supplied by stores that are competitive with the city stores, and many even sell better merchandise than the city average. Farmers typically demand quality it seems, quality tools, cloths, and furniture. Most of the stores that provide these are 100 year old family run businesses that don't allow too much crap in. The hardware being the exception but what hardware can you get now that isn't manufactured in third world dumps.

Still half of the product is good and the staff will warn you about the crap if you interact with them. Some I know on a first name basis and see them outside of work in various places. The eat-out food on the other hand is generally a let down but I was never an eat out type of guy anyway. The best part of the town, which I was keenly aware of before I moved, is that it is about 60/40 with the majority being new residents from far away cities and towns and about 40% local born and bred here. That's more important than most people are aware, the small town clique is something impossible to enter unless you were born in the town or it's surrounds and can make life miserable for an outsider.

It took about 3 years of research and looking to pick this place Pops, and probably 10 years of awakening to know what sort of place you would need in an energy poor future. I hope I made the right choice because hard times are definitely coming. One promising thing is that the road-signs leading back to the nearest city are often full of bullet holes. Lots of people own out this way. It's a myth that Australia was disarmed, you wouldn't believe what's around, and much of it off the books thanks to the laws brought in a couple of decades ago.

As an aside, when they brought in the draconian covid rules (not laws) travel was restricted and that trapped a lot of RVers in one place, one town. There was very little traffic on the highways back then but I only ever saw one pullover by the cops, a car and caravan. It was easy to flout the rules if you concocted a story why you needed to travel 100 miles away but I was never pulled over or questioned, another case of the people policing themselves, the dumb sheep phenomina.

Even the state crossings were closed to all but truck transport or special cases where you worked or shopped across the border. That's where all the cops were, policing the borders HaHaHA. It didn't effect me but many people were trapped on the wrong side and couldn't get home! But there was a loophole, believe it or not if you were buying a home in another state you were allowed to travel there to see it, and to move there. It was all BS, the whole thing. Engineered as an experiment I think to see how people would react to such measures. Measures that might have to be introduced in the years to come Pops as our access to F-Fuels decline? There were other elements of the scam too, like the destruction of the small business model in favor of the big corporate stores but even that was limited.

[Pops]

For a long time on this site (almost 20 years) I was the lone buggedout farmer. Mid oughts we bought 40 acres in the middle of the country after selling for an inflated price on the west coast. I was like you with a list, I wanted rainfall, long growing season, distance from cities, proximity to a small town, as small a GW impact as possible, etc. My estimate wos decline, the supply kind, by 2012.

For a long time Planning For The Future was the most active forum here. And I hauranged everyone about the need to do something to prepare right away. Then along about 2012 it became clear that I'd jumped the gun. That technology (and sufficient free money) thrown at rigs could indeed displace depletion if only for a decade or two. By that time, my kids were well enough established in the military that I didn't expect them to need me, as support anyway.

Since then we've been fiddling around, fixing and flipping houses and pretending the money we were making was due to our handiwork, LOL But we were able to move around the country some. The ole Flipping biz ain't what it used to be to say the least but we've become quite addicted to the moving around. Besides...

Its better to burn out than fade away...

[theluckycountry]

Good Neil young, he can sing it alright.

I tried the "land" thing on 5 acres, I never got around to the growing food stage but one day I realized I was making enough in a couple of weeks to feed myself for a year and more so I lost interest. Like you pops a lot of us jumped the gun, the collapse is long in coming and no doubt there will be plenty of heads up, even a week would be enough for me to super-stockpile, fuel and food.

Even granting a large collapse I calculated that the government wouldn't let 99% of the population starve overnight, they will prioritize farming over a lot of other pointless expenditures and I decided that living in a farming community and making contacts, friends, was a better idea than spending my old age plowing a field and chasing after chickens. Not many people have the farming bone in themselves, I certainly don't. But the old survivalist sites banged on and on saying that it was the way to go, the natural end-point of a preppers evolution. They were wrong, still are IMO. I buy eggs from a lady out of town on 15 acres. They have a pretty straightened life out there because they are the small farm types. The husband works a day job of course, eggs don't pay electricity bills or put gasoline in the car, and every other week they are in the supermarket to stock up on what they can't grow or breed. It's a hard life and most of it a waste of time in my opinion. But having said that they will do better than many in a collapse providing it doesn't get too brutal. I don't write off the small farm apocalypse solution but it's not all a bed of roses.

Many things can go wrong farming. A couple of years ago there was a 5 day deluge here and farms had food rotting in the ground. Just the other week a freak hailstorm trashed a large growing region nearby, it destroyed the crops and a lot of huge shadehouses too.

8 days ago — Freak hailstorm delivers $50 million blow to already struggling Lockyer Valley farming region

"I have never seen hail that looks like snow like you would swear that you were driving through Thredbo or Perisher."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2023- ... /103097496

Whatsis face on the other thread thinks that in a collapse scenario there will be no excess food, like the farmers and their close friends around me can eat 20 steers a year and 20 acres of corn? Those farmers will sell or trade whatever they can, especially to a guy with cash and thousands of silver coins to buy it with. The idea that only people with home farms will survive is ludicrous to me. Like millions are going to sit outside their fences and starve while they eat like kings?

That sort of thinking came from another age when no one was really starving anyway, it's Great depression thinking with a MadMax ending. It's Hollywood thinking, it's Oblivion with Tom Cruse living in his secret lush valley. It's the The Postman, it's Z for Zachariah with Margot Robbie and her dog surviving the nuclear holocaust in her own idyllic little valley. In reality in a dark future people will probably do what they have always done. Band together into compact villages for protection.

There is little protection when you live beside a rural road and your neighbors are a half a mile away. But then survivalists come in with delusions of Camp Gloria, ramparts and fields of fire, 24/7 armed squats on the lookout. Good luck with that when a group of desperadoes can simply ram-raid your gate and drive through your front door. Just like they do now when they rob liquor stores. One motorcycle shop down here got raided with a front end loader! Try to stop that if it had a metal plate over the screen. Too many delusions pops and not enough clear thinking. Too many people following each other in a herd. Do you know what the survivalists types think of Gold? You can't eat it they say pops, and they have missed out on 20 years of tax-free gains with that thinking. I ignored their collective stupidity and started buying in at au$550/oz. It's over $3000/oz here now. Tax free "collectors coins" that I can and have once sold back for cash. Just a little to test the waters. You always have to test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJBBSlFuMeU

[theluckycountry]

WTI $70
Brent $76

Well this is good news in the sense that our gas is cheaper, bad news as far as any conservation efforts go. Someone once suggested that a $200 oil price would be a good thing because it would force conservation on the world, we'd do a lot less frivolous driving, drive far more fuel efficient vehicles. Even mining would be effected and perhaps instead of manufacturing billions of junk metal toasters and iphones every year a trend would have begun building things that last, but I doubt the latter.

The petri dish has no rules, it's simply left under the heat lamp to develop as nature sees fit. That's what all of this really about, not political maleficence or greedy corporations, or brain dead consumers planet-wide, but the natural growth and outcomes of said growth among one particularly virulent species inhabiting the planet.

[theluckycountry]

Well we're definitely on the up cycle again,
WTI $87
Brent $91

We see these cycles every 2 or 5 years now but each time it occurs the global economy is materially weaker. I wonder if we'll crack $100?