[OldKat]

I don’t know J-L, but it sounds to me like you get more done in one day than most people do in a week. I admire your tenacity.

[OldKat]

@B Grant 24817 wrote:

I was able to do so, but unfortunately they were somewhat less than enthusiastic about them – evidently they do not brush their cattle – or horses for that matter. In fact, one farmer admitted that they are pretty awful to their animals.

It is illegal to slaughter cattle in Cuba. You go to jail for 10-20 years. All the cattle are owned by the government, and when your team gets old or lame they come and replace it. Perhaps the fact that the farmers don’t actually own their oxen is a disincentive to treat them properly.

Nearly all the cattle we saw were Brahmans. Brahma x Holstein is quite popular. Some of the most beautiful cattle I’ve ever seen. Average yield of milk per day on their cows is only 6 litres. Mind you from what I could see they don’t water their animals whatsoever. Very interesting trip.

Brendan

Nice observations Brendan, thanks for posting them.

Isn’t that sort of the draw back to any system where the individuals don’t own the production capacity, what ever that may be? I mean there is some basis to the old adage to “take care of it, like you own it”. If people don’t own something and know they never will there is little reason to take special care of it.

I would expect their cattle to be Brahman type or at least some sort of bos indicus cattle, as bos taurus cattle would likely suffer from tropical degeneration in that climate.

[OldKat]

@Carl Russell 24781 wrote:

On the surface that seems like good sense, but I will say that if the value of the saw is that is will cut, cut what you want and when you want, the lower cost saws are almost disposable in comparison.

It truly comes down to a personal decision. That is fine. It just deserves mention, because many people don’t realize that the professional saws are actually the ones that keep the company in business, reputation etc.

Carl

I can’t add anything to this discussion, because I use my two saws so seldom that I don’t think either has been started in probably five years. Carl’s comments remind me of a conversation that I had with a small engine guy in our town several years ago, though. I was asking him why you never see MacCullough chain saw dealers anymore. At least in our area no one handles them any longer. I think he said at one point they were completely out of business, which kind of surprised me because I thought that when I was kid they had a reputation as being a fairly rugged saw … at least as far as lower priced saws go. He said that they started making them lighter and lighter, so they could sell them for $79.0 at the big box stores and at Wal-Mart. He said people would bring saws in for him to repair that were only had 20 to 25 hours on them or so and they would be completely shot. When he gave them an estimate to repair the saw they would get mad at HIM, because it would cost more to repair it than it would to buy a new one. He said he finally just started telling people that he would not work on any Mac saw regardless how new or old it was.

He also showed me how to read the code on the manufacturers tag for expected hours of use. Not sure if they still do this, but apparently it was required at the time. Shortly after he showed me how to read the code, I was in a big box store looking at leaf blowers and hedge trimmers. Would you believe some of them had a life expectancy of less than 10 hours? I can’t begin to determine what saw would be best for your situation, but apparently it works out here like it does in other situations … you get what you pay for.

[OldKat]

@jac 24565 wrote:

Hi OldKat.. I am afraid I have been a real cynic when it comes to the oil and gas companies.. I always thought the rise in price of diesel compared to petrol coincided with the rise in diesel car sales and the winter spike was to cash in on folks having to crank up their oil and gas fired heating systems:D…
John

Well, you would be right about that too. There is no doubt more demand now for diesel than there was 25 years ago, simply because there are more autos and light trucks burning it than there use to be. The first diesel pickup truck that I bought was the result of seeing people, including me, standing in line to buy gasoline during the oil embargo(s) of the 1970’s and seeing people in a diesel vehicle zip up to the pump and buy fuel that was 10, 15 or 20% cheaper. That is not the case now and I’m not sure I would buy a diesel today if I were to replace my current (17 year old) pickup.

Just saw a show about home prices in different parts of the US. A home that would cost you $1.8 Million (US) in Newport Beach, Ca could be bought for $68,000 in Detroit, Mi. I don’t want to live in either city, but that shows you how much more demand there is to live on the beach than there is to live in Motor City. Same thing happens when any product or commodity sees an increased demand.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to move away from oil. I am no spokesman or apologist for the industry. I’d like to be able to tell the OPEC countries where they can stick their oil & it ain’t in a tanker. However I hear things all the time in the media and elsewhere about oil / gasoline prices that I know are inaccurate. I don’t want my friends on this board to fall into the trap of making inaccurate statements because they happen to have a dislike for oil companies. Hate ’em all you want, just make sure you know what you are talking about first.

BTW: A couple of years ago there was a real trend for the media to talk about the record profits that oil companies were making at a time of high prices. There was a near constant buzz about so and so oil company made so many BILLIONS of dollars in the previous quarter. Those were probably accurate statements. What went unsaid was that the return on investment in the oil industry typically runs about 8% and almost never tops 10%. In most industries a company will not invest in a venture unless they can earn 12% and many want 14% or better before spending a single penny. One of the reasons oil companies have such high revenue is that they are investing massive amounts of money to do so. Fact is many other companies would idle their production lines for similar returns. Never thought of it that way before, had you?

[OldKat]

@boulami 24526 wrote:

My daughter had 100 gallons(imp) or 450 litres delivered and it was .93 cents a litre tax not included. That is here in New-Brunswick. Here tax is 13%so that 100 litres was $468. Diesel here is $1.23/litre, gazoline $110/litres.
Every week on thursday they have a readjustment of prices, which could vary from 1 to 4 cents or stay the same. As everywhere else in North America we all complain about high prices, so in our province they play with this readjustment thing. Don’t really understand the formula but its based on the barrel of oil price at the NYSE.
So they play with everybody’s mind every week. On wednesday via media they let you know if the price is going up or down, an estimate . If you go by the gaz tanks on wednesday and see poeple gasing up you know price is going up.
I guest you could go from state to state or province to province and find some difference everywhere you go(taxes and prices). And all that time those gaz companies are making mil.. huh billions. Its not as if where going to stop buying oil or gaz tomorrow so why play with us this way????
Guess I could go on and on and……:mad::(:confused:

Never was involved in any crude marketing or refined petroleum products either for that matter, but I have been involved in marketing natural gas. It is done in a manner similar to crude & refined products. Not sure about pricing in Canada, but in the US it is based on an index of bid prices at a specific regional terminal. Transportation costs are added to that so that if you are closer to the point of origin (called a basis) it is cheaper than at the terminal, if you are near the terminal it will be the same and the further you are from the closest regional terminal the more it will cost. This is wholesale pricing; the distributor and/or retailer will mark the product up for their services.

The cost of getting a barrel of oil to the surface includes legal expenses, lease costs, exploration & production costs among other things. These are collectively referred to as “lift costs”. When I worked on the production side of the business some 15 to 20 years ago our lift costs were about $30.0 per barrel. (We benchmarked that to the other majors. We were generally in the middle of the pack; some could do it cheaper, some spent more. That would translate to about $60.0 today.) Anyway, from there the product incurs transportation costs and refining / processing and storage costs and then after refining / processing more transportation and storage costs to the end use market.

As you said, taxes are added to that. That would be the local and state (province, etc) taxes. In the US there is also a federal tax. I forget the exact figure, but I think that in some areas the taxes add something on the order of 25% to 33% to the cost. In the US, the total taxes often (nearly always) exceed the profit made by the producer, transporters, processors / refiners, distributors and retailers combined. Canada may tax less, I don’t know. I’ve heard that in Europe it is taxed much higher, but never looked it up myself so I can’t say for sure. When you look at the whole sliced pie, the biggest slice is for taxes. No single component adds as much cost as the taxes do collectively. So I guess my question is: who is really profiting the most off of you?

BTW: On an earlier post someone questioned why diesel prices are so much higher than gasoline prices. On a seasonal basis the biggest factor that impacts this is that diesel and heating oil (bunker 6 maybe?) compete for the same resource in the refining chain. That is nothing new; it has always been that way. It does help explain why diesel prices spike in the winter. The reason it has outpaced gasoline recently is that about 4 or 5 years ago or so there was a new requirement put in to reduce the amount of sulfur in the fuel, which essentially amounted to the diesel now having to be “cooked” two complete times and further refined to remove the sulfur and some other paticulates as per an EPA mandate (maybe part of the Clean Air Act?), not an industry requirement.

May not be what most people want to hear, but there it is.

[OldKat]

Sorry to hear that this happened to you. Hope it all works out in the end. I don’t really understand snow loading and such, because it seldom ever snows where I live. However, I do have some Amish friends that lost a barn and three greenhouses about two or three weeks ago due to a tornado. I have had an expereince similar to theirs, so I know this sort of thing can really set you back. Hope you can fully recover from this and go forward from here.

[OldKat]

Nice hitch. Very impressive setup & animals. Looks like you are in someone’s indoor rodeo arena.

[OldKat]

Carl,

I am logged in (obviously), but I can’t see the picture you posted in this thread. I don’t see anything other than the text of the thread. Any idea what I can do to be able to see what you guys are talking about?

Thanks …

[OldKat]

Carl,

Sorry to hear of your problem with uveitis in your mare. For you or anyone else that is having problems with uveitis, you might be interested in looking at the Guardian masks. I have first hand experience with them; they help a whole lot. Hhere is the address for their site. http://www.horsemask.com/

[OldKat]

@houstonmule 23544 wrote:

So far so good. They were fine last winter. They have access to a quanst with lots of straw to get out of the wind. I was instructed that the need to be out of the wind at -20.

Aren’t they from fairly far south in Africa? I would think that they could take some cold weather, but this kind of surprises me.

[OldKat]

blue80 wrote:

George, I think too that fuel prices will go up and stay up. From what I have been told:

1/U.S. dollar has been the global tier for commodity trades, and that has given the U.S. an edge on cheap fuel through OPEC. As the U.S. dollar is devalued and used less in global exchange, the U.S. advantage and subsidized fuel goes away

2/Emerging markets in asia/china are showing an insatiable lust for oil/energy. I was told no matter if all of us quit using our vehicles, fuel prices wouldn’t go down, as the growing demand is with the billion or so people planning to buy a car and heat their structures with fossil fuels in the next decade.

Hi near horse;

I’m confused. Either I misread his (blue80’s) original post, which I partially pasted above, or I am misunderstanding your premise … maybe both! I meant to make it clear that I disagreed with the idea that speculation as opposed to supply / demand was the driver in pricing energy (oil, gas, electricity … whatever), maybe I didn’t do so. I think where we differ on interpreting his original post is in the part about “if all of us quit using our vehicles, fuel prices wouldn’t go down”. I was taking that to mean that if all of us in the United States, or maybe the “western world” stopped using petroleum the price still wouldn’t go down, due to the fact that there has been greatly increased demand in Asia and India. I would be in agreement that there has in fact been a massive increase in demand in these areas of the world. My disagreement is in the concept that if the US and/or Europe closed the tap on crude usage that it wouldn’t impact prices. It would, and I can safely say that AJ would be in agreement with my belief. BTW: He is from India, so he is very interested in what is happening over there.

If you are interested, I can explain why I say that speculation does not impact spot prices (contrary to what Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly and other media pundits have said about it). However it is a little complex (and dry); so I won’t go into it unless someone is really interested.

near horse wrote:

I also don’t understand why the 2-3% changes in supply/demand causing prices to move was a revelation – 2 to 3% still represents tens of billions of dollars (at least).

Maybe I failed to quantify what I was saying in this instance. Crude prices move in the same manner natural gas prices do, in fact in probably the same manner as all commodities do, in relation to supply / demand. Since my experiences are with gas rather than crude, let me use it as an example. Gas is trading on the spot market today at about $4.40 per dekatherm, which adjusted for inflation / weak dollar is higher, but not dramatically different than the $1.65 to 2.00 per dth it was trading at 15 years ago when I worked on the trading floor at the old Tenneco Gas Marketing and then Chevron USA. Obviously gas would move up and down in price relative to how much demand there was for it. The winter time prices would reflect increased demand for space heating, summer would see increased demand for electric generation due to air conditioning load, with the fall and spring typically seeing weaker price support due to less seasonal demand.

However, sometimes we would see prices ramp up slowly over a given period of time from a seasonal low of $1.50 or 1.60 until it reached what had been a hard cap, say $2.00. Then if there was an extreme heat wave or an extreme cold spell the prices would suddenly spike; $3.00, 4.00, 5.00, 6.00 maybe $7.0 or more per dekatherm. When I studied these spikes I realized that we hadn’t really seen that much of an increase in demand relative to the price spike, it was just that the last few percentage points of supply to cover this relatively small increase in demand came at a huge premium in price. There was simply too much demand chasing too little supply, even though the total increase in demand had not been that much over the “average” high demand for that general time period. I think this is consistent with the idea that while we may never truly run out of oil, it will eventually get so expensive that it can no longer be burned as fuel. When supply consistently runs just a relatively few percentage points below supply the price will get out of our reach. Hope this makes sense.

[OldKat]

Wow! I’ve been gone few days and you guys have moved on to some really good points. bivol; I am sometimes amazed at the insight that you have. I know few American college students that are thinking at the level that you are. If there are more like you at home, I am pretty sure your country will find its way.

Yes it is a sad situation that our would-be “leaders” have gotten us into. Like somebody else said though, we don’t have to wait for Washington or London or any other center to lead us. We can make buying decisions (where possible) to support or own producers, let the marketers know … when you sell good, domestic products I will buy from you; keep pedaling this foreign made crap and I will let it stay on your shelves. I agree with whoever said it; Chinese made products are crap and I won’t buy them if at all possible.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

[OldKat]

@blue80 23329 wrote:

George, I think too that fuel prices will go up and stay up. From what I have been told:

1/U.S. dollar has been the global tier for commodity trades, and that has given the U.S. an edge on cheap fuel through OPEC. As the U.S. dollar is devalued and used less in global exchange, the U.S. advantage and subsidized fuel goes away

2/Emerging markets in asia/china are showing an insatiable lust for oil/energy. I was told no matter if all of us quit using our vehicles, fuel prices wouldn’t go down, as the growing demand is with the billion or so people planning to buy a car and heat their structures with fossil fuels in the next decade.

3/Environmental regs are becoming more and more restrictive, and costly. The gulf oil blowout accelerated this. Unfortunately, the market is no longer supply and demand, rather the speculation of supply and demand. You see it all over the news. Based on “reports” the stacked market changes…

4/Trucking regs are becoming more and more restrictive, and about 1/2 of the bridges in the states need repaired apparently. These costs pass down to the consumer….

I am with you on debt, we think about resizing too…No fun being a slave to the lender, making decisions based on the bills you have to pay, instead of what work is worth doing. But my problems are largely self inflicted.:o Hopefully now that I know better, I will do better;)

I had a discussion with one of our analysts yesterday about gasoline prices. I work for a large diversified energy firm & AJ is one of our analysts that track energy costs on a micro and macro level for the company. His take was pretty much in agreement with what you posted, with a few modifications.

A few other thougts from my vantage point. Something that gets glossed over in most discussion is that the weak dollar is a product of our own governments reckless spending. As we print money, like Charmin prints toilet paper, to “monetize” the debt each new batch makes the sum total in circulation worth incrementally less. Simple economic fact. Our government is destroying our way of life with debt. I also heard recently that Russia and China are doing everything within their power to cause our dollar to not be used as the benchmark in trading, as you mentioned above. Yet there are people that insist that China is our friend. They are NOT our friend and we are crazy to think they are.

I disagree with the concept that the markets are no longer driven by supply and demand, but rather by the speculation of supply and demand. There is simply no basis for this idea. The energy markets are an EXTREMELY efficient set of markets; there is virtually NOTHING of any significance that happens to the supply side or the demand side that isn’t factored into pricing almost immediately. Is this speculation? No, it is market intelligence pure and simple. At one time I worked on the trading floor of what was then the largest producer and marketer of natural gas in the country. I had a portolio of supply to manage, almost entirely in the GOM (Gulf of Mexico). I use to watch the markets chase natural gas prices up and down & got really interested in what kind of change in supply it took to generate a strong upward or downward price tic. I assumed that it would probably take a shortfall or an oversupply of something on the order of 15 to 20% to see prices move. After about 2 or 3 years of closely monitoring this situation I came up with another number. Guess what? It was closer to 2.5 to 3%. With that in mind, there is NO WAY every American driver could swear off gasoline without sharply impacted the price. Of course there is also NO WAY every American is going to forgo gasoline. The good news is that if we each reduced our fuel use by 10% or so we could dramatically impact crude prices, which would impact gasoline prices in turn. Why, because the US is such a large consumer of the stuff that a 10% reduction in use would translate into a sizeable reduction in the worldwide demand.

I have other thoughts as well, but this post is already reaching novella length so I’ll stop here. I’ll leave you with this though… don’t believe much of anything you see in the “popular” press about energy matters. As I close in on finishing up my 30th year in the energy sector I can look back and count on ONE hand the number of times that I have seen a story in the media about anything related to energy that was forthright, unbiased and accurate. At times I have seen stories in the press where I had FIRST HAND KNOWLEDGE of the issues at hand, yet when I read the story I could hardly recognize it as the same situation. Not covering for the enrgy industry, that is just the way it is.

[OldKat]

@OldKat 23215 wrote:

I’m thinking that someone posted a video on this site about a year or so ago of some horses in Eastern Europe doing exactly what you are asking about. I think maybe it was bivol that posted it, so you might check all posts that he has made and see if you can find it.

Good luck …

Actually, the horses that I am thinking about were carrying firewood in bundles on their backs … sort of a pack saddle rig and not dragging the logs. Point is they were doing it unsupervised and not driven. Pretty cool video if you can put your finger on it. Maybe send bivol a PM and ask if he can remember posting something like that.

[OldKat]

I’m thinking that someone posted a video on this site about a year or so ago of some horses in Eastern Europe doing exactly what you are asking about. I think maybe it was bivol that posted it, so you might check all posts that he has made and see if you can find it.

Good luck …

[Author]

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