Oil Money and Extra Terrestrials

One of they guys I work with knows someone at Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority. Their contract for fuel lets them pay something like $2 a gallon for diesel right now. That is from a contract a long time ago. That contract ends later this year. They are going to have to go from $2 to something like $4.50 a gallon. I've heard several times that the price is going to go up. The current price is $1 to ride on a standard rout. I've heard every number between $1.35 to $2.50 all at once. Metro gets tax money. Either the fair must go up dramatically or the subsidy must go up.

Metro is just one example of cost rise. The cost of everything is going up. Trains are very efficient, but no one has a warehouse on a train line any more. They have to use trucks to get their wares around.

Everything made of plastic is going up in price. Electricity, usually generated via some fossil fuel, is going up. Water, pumped with power and cleaned up through plans that need lots of energy, is going up in price. Food, bot being used as fuel via bio-fuel and energy expensive farming techniques, is going up in price. I don't need to mention airline travel. Even data centers are feeling the pinch. Not just for energy, but coolant, consumables and shipping things around.

Where goes the cost of energy, so goes the cost of just about everything else. That is why the do not include energy in the cost of inflation. Because energy is built in to the cost of just about everything people buy every day.

The thought of gas being used as money is already happening. Someone on a pod cast reported that not only are car sellers using gas cards as an incentive for buying something, so are grocery stores and  strip clubs. I expect the credit card that has a discount on gas is pre-approved and in the mail in it's way to me as I type.

The solution to this sort of spiral is pretty obvious. Stop traveling so much. Stop consuming so much. Learn to live with the things that do not cause you to travel so much or consume so much.  That sounds like a liberal tree-hugger solution. Well, maybe it is. My ever shrinking wallet may turn me in to an environmentalist.

People in the U. S. don't realize it for the most part, but they have received a 20% pay cut over the last couple years. Between the tanking dollar and the cost of labor and goods from the rest of the world, the same old salary is just not worth as much as it was. The U. S. is not the only place where this is happening. China is going through a pay spiral as is India. Those cheap places to get things designed or built are not so cheap any more. There is a balancing going on. In a couple of decades, there will be few places left to find the cheap labor  manufacturing or services.

I would love to know what percentage of all human wealth has gone to a few families in the Middle East over the past century.

<end of rational blogging>
<begin conspiracy blogging>

All this makes me wonder if the aliens landed some time in the thirties and said we, the whole world, had to meet some criteria to join the Intergalactic Collective (IC).

• Create the internet. One place for the IC to communicate to the whole world at once.
  
• Establish a world government, or at lest a central method of controlling what goes on over the entire world. One stop shopping for the IC to come in and dictate new rules and collect taxes.
• Eliminate borders, at least for rules like enforcing certain rules and and flow of information.
  
• Establish freedom of movement world wide. Not so much freedom for individuals to move around at will. More the freedom of the central government to enforce the rules.
  
• One ID card for every one on the planet.
• Keep track of every one on the planet, womb to tomb database.
  
• Explore other planets in our neighborhood.