Grace pointed me to some rather potent catnip she gave to her cat, Jett. After seeing him go bonkers on the stuff, I had to get some for the cats my sister and her roommate have. So after some waiting, the package finally arrived and she gave some of this catnip to the cats. Hilarious little buggers. Check out the Youtubage below.
Who else got stuffed to the gills because you got told, “you’re still growing, you should eat more”? Yeah, I’m growing, but only sideways now. I’m pretty sure 6 or 7 creatures on the food chain got whacked for the meal I ate yesterday (not including the large pile of shrimp). It was a dinner for 8. Hooray for leftovers though!
Anybody crazy enough to go to a Chinese restaurant over the weekend?
Someone please blow up their R&D and marketing departments so they stop douching around with jerseys.
Today I learned about contango, specifically, how it relates to the oil industry. Currently, crude oil is trading at about $30ish a barrel, a far cry from the $147 a barrel it was last summer. This has caused a few companies to hoard some oil. Basically, there are people with lots of money who buy up a couple million barrels worth of oil at current prices, stick it on some super tanker that costs like $50,000 a day to rent/operate (plus extraneous costs like security to ward off pirates) and get some schmuck to sign a contract promising they’ll buy the oil in the short future (like 6 months or a year) at $55 a barrel. Costs millions, but they make millions more. Sounds dumb, right? Especially since we’ve seen nothing but downtrends for oil. But there’s a giant trade in this stuff and big companies are hoarding oil to sell it later at a speculative cost.
It’s sort of like shorting the market, except with the risk of piracy and more complications with logistics. You can make a ton more money though, but you also incur more risk (bigger the risk, bigger the gain and also bigger the loss). Thing is, who would sign a deal to buy oil at more than $20 a barrel more than the current price? That means you expect some significant gain over $20 in the amount of time you signed the contract for. When we’ve seen a $100 price drop in the per barrel of oil AND Texas is sitting on all this oil because of a drop in demand, plus all the political shifts to “go green” and all, I don’t really see who would sign such contracts. But then, Wall Street lost like $7 trillion selling what was essentially fracking nothing (bad loans on no collateral ahoy) so I guess there’s really a buyer for anything, even if they have nothing to buy with.
The more I learn about the economy, the more I wonder if anyone knows what the hell they are doing. Well, aside from the scammers.
