The Million Dollar Way (The Bakken Oil Blog): Wow, Wow, Wow -- I Don't Know If Anyone's Paying Attention -- But We're Almost Back to $80-WTI -- Dashboards Posted -- May 13, 2024

Locator: 47147B.

$60 - $80 is the new trading range.

$60 - $80 is the new $40 - $60.

Thinking out loud, rambling: if WTI (not Brent) were to trend toward $90 this summer, that would be quite interesting. A lot of folks would suggest that will not be helpful for the Biden administration and withdrawing more oil from the SPR becomes more problematic, and probably wouldn't do much for price of WTI and gasoline. But I'm surprise that we're trending toward $80 again.

Pricing, California: the headline is incredibly misleading. Link here.

The "price you see" is NOT the price you will pay under this new law. It comes close, but the California politicians writing this law knew that there had to be one exception. Tipping is one exception but not the exception I'm thinking about. That one exception I noticed is in the fine print and it not mentioned at all in the article, again, except for tipping. See if you can spot the omission. Link here. Again, the headline is technically correct, but in my mind, very misleading. Certainly the overall tone of the article is very, very misleading. With all the attention on restaurants, California must have some peculiar restaurant pricing. I would think car rentals, air transportation, hotel / motels, concert tickets would be the low-hanging fruit for this law.

Legislation: more and more legislation appears to be laws to satisfy a single politician's personal pet peeve.

Silver lining in high restaurant prices: folks are finding how much money they can save by eating at home.

Exhibit A: $7.00 at Starbucks for a coffee and a croissant was tolerable two years ago; now, coffee and a croissant, all of a sudden, at $8.50 is not tolerable. As if $1.50 on top of $7 for coffee / croissant is deal-breaker. Exhibit B: $7.95 for Big Mac meal two years ago was tolerable; folks balk at $8.50 for same meal. Oh, give me a break.

I assume most folks won't understand the point I'm trying to make -- those folks are generally referred to as cupcakes -- just as folks did not understand the point Apple was trying to make with its iPad commercial, May 7, 2024, or the "5-7" commercial as it's now called, comparing it to "9-11," I guess.

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Hubbert's Peak Oil Theory

Link here. If it's by Charles Kennedy, you know it's good.