How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost It All

Colonel Drake punched through 69 feet of Pennsylvania bedrock using 1300 year old Chinese salt-drilling techniques (and early 19th century cast iron well casings). Well Number 1, Bahrain, still supplied 35,000 barrels of oil per day eighty years after it was drilled.

http://www.geoexpro.com/articles/2012/12/bahrain-80-years-an...

Oil (and coal and gas) absolutely changed the world, and quite simply, they're not like other raw materials. They're not transformed by processing, they're consumed, they dwarf all other material inputs to the modern economy other than air and water (both of which are readily available from the envrionment ... usually). And we're using them at rates of 1,000 to 5,000,000 times faster than they were initially produced.

Energy itself enables complexity (though it's a, um, complex relationship). Bootstrapping the modern world happened only once, and under what appears to be a singular mix of conditions ranging from geological to philosophical, despite humans having walked over the very sources of our modern wealth in the Middle East, China, Britain, North America, and Australia for many thousands of years.

If you're curious about what equilibrium energy prices for energy alternatives -- fungible, storable, on-demand energy that modern civilisation requires -- might be, look to the best alternatives to oil and see what they run.

For biofuels, it's about $300 to $1,000 dollars per barrel. Keep in mind that the US presently returns slightly over $1,000 in GDP per barrel of oil consumed. In Europe it's typically higher -- $1,500 to $3,000 (in Switzerland). In much of the world it's far lower -- China and India are in the $400 - $500 GDP/bbl range. At $1,000/bbl, they would forego a tremendous amount of low-return (but vital to their burgeoning populations) economic activity.

Solar energy gives lower costs, but that's with tremendous fossil inputs to construction an absolutely enormous capital plant, dwarfing anything we've built to date. Human's largest current technological artifact mostly involved pouring hot tar over prepared ground, and that is a challenging expense and maintenance problem. Consider computer chips spanning tens of thousands of square kilometers, in wind, rain, dust, and hail.

You might want to think some over just what it is "cost", "value", "price", and "wealth" mean, represent, interact, and how we got to where we are. Mainstream economic thought strikes me as strongly lacking in substance here, evidenced by much of the long debate over the meanings of those terms. Their current generally accepted values are by no means the only ones proposed, though the debate now is largely quashed.

Also, some cell carriers, foreign carriers, etc are IPv6 with v4 gateways handling non-v6 traffic, so a lot of the demand that would have exhausted v4 completely just went v6 to avoid the hassle. Big roll outs can't expect v4 to work for them, so v6 is now the default for many of these carriers who are told by ARIN to go suck a lemon.

What you're seeing is a very slow and ugly move to v6 that's just enough not to cause a v4 panic. This is just the way its going to be for a long time. No one is just going to go to v6 as long as their existing v4 IP's are okay. They'll just go v6 when their requests for /8's, /12's, and /16's get denied.