Have We Mentioned Lately That We’re Totally Screwed?

Since it’s now on two posts, I’m going to have to use your alt-text in tonight’s WC post.

@SanFranLefty: Your browser misleads you.

@nojo: Hmmm. Weird. Damn Mozilla!

Well, I still may have to use it…

@SanFranLefty: “Mojira” in the original Japanese version.

There was a blowout in a well off Australia last year that occurred when a seal failed. The cement contractor: Halliburton.

Don’t fret, Nojo, they’re plugging the leaks and our hurting asses with maturing whisky or something. I blowout you not.

Dodgerblue, Halliburton is the only global, large-job cement contractor. As wretched and scummy as they are, it’s like saying Pepsi sold bad Pepsi. Long reach is long.

speaking of screwed, these stock market predictions are starting to sound like something from one of those “2012” things on the discovery channel:

investors will be devastated in a crash much worse than the declines of 2008 and early 2009 or the worst years of the Great Depression or the Panic of 1873, he predicted.

For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,”
The Dow, which now stands at 9,686.48, is likely to fall well below 1,000 over perhaps five or six years as a grand market cycle comes to an end, he said.
A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.

Link

@maitri: You are right. And Transocean is the biggest supplier of mobile drilling rigs. BP may have made many errors here, but they did not cheap out on hiring experienced contractors.

@Capt Howdy: I read that this weekend and have been freaking out ever since. My rather conservatively invested nest egg has lost 30% of its value since Jan 2008. Mr Cyn and I are one mildly serious illness away from bankruptcy and homelessness. And we’re still better off than most people.

Good Lord, can’t we just cut out the waiting period and start building the Thunderdome right now? It is half-measures that destroy us, in the end.

@maitri: ::waves madly::

@Capt Howdy:

For what it’s worth, they said the same thing in March, 2009, and then the Dow Jones shot up 63%-ish over the next 12 months. No one knows what’ll happen.

Totally my opinion, but it seems most likely over the last three decades that we’ve been headed towards a highly economically stratified society, like Mexico, with a tiny, super-wealthy E-leet (1-2% of the population), a small middle-class that services them (maybe 10-15% of the population), and then everyone else fighting over the carcass. We’ll see a once-unthinkable decline in the standard of living for the formerly middle-class and working poor over the next ten years, but this will have little effect on the price of equities and bonds, which people in this group never owned to begin with. It’s also worth noting that there’s currently $7 trillion-with-a-T sitting in bank accounts in cash, and corporations are hoarding record cash reserves, so those factors will help support what one might euphemistically call “the Economy.”

Jeebus that’s depressin’. Needz some more laughs on this Slow Nooz Day. Will report back.

@Original Andrew:

AnonymousReuters delivers:

Tired Gay succumbs to Dix

Is it “bring your kids” to work day at the headline writer’s desk?

@Original Andrew: Directions we’ve heretofore never been asked by passing drivers while smoking outside the Stinque Remote Office:

“Do you know where the unemployment office is?”

Oh, right — you wanted something amusing.

Here’s some good news to cheer y’all up:

Economists say pot prices will plummet upon legalization from $375/oz to $38/oz.

RJ Reynolds will probably start growing weed in China and undercut the farmers of Humboldt County.

@Dodgerblue: What really scares me here is that all large companies today (Halliburton, Transocean, Bear Stearns, Pepsi, ADM, pick one) got really big in this fashion: good work + smart acquisitions –> ok work + corporate leveraging –> mediocre/crap work + political pull. At the final stage, they are larger than whole national economies and are Too Big To Fail (TM) and their product simultaneously sucks but, too late, we’re stuck with them. There is no more if you can’t beat them, join them. It’s you can’t beat them, so merge, partner or die.

@JNOV: Haaiiiiiii!

@maitri: :-D

@SanFranLefty: Humbolt? Crap. Legalization would keep my cousin out of jail for awhile until he learns to cook meth.

@maitri: Right on the money. I think we’re seeing this play out in the media world also.

@al2o3cr:
someone in my office just said that Reuters had a thing that automatically replaced the word gay with homosexual and it replaced that guys name once. so they changed it.

can that be true?

@Capt Howdy: That did happen, but it wasn’t Reuters.

@JNOV: @maitri: Okay, who’s passing notes in the back of class?

@nojo: She’s fookin’ AWSUM! Trufax.

@SanFranLefty:

Because we all know how many people buy cigarettes and booze under the table, right? The anti-legalization crowd is really running out of ammunition.

On the other hand, the thought of a nation smoking the pot equivalent of “Bud Light” (tasteless, characterless dreck) is somewhat revolting – and I’m sure RJR will come out with something that’s 3% pot, 50% tobacco and 47% additives and fiberglass.

The televised sports industry would have a hell of a time; not much excitement in a stadium full of 100k baked fans. :)