Out of Pod Experience

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/01/1001662/-Icelands-On-going-Revolution

I think CCP may well end up in charge of iceland.

We told you so never gets old when you are right

Iceland is not in the EU.

This article has some pretty glaring errors in it.
Biggest is that Iceland is not and never has been a member of the EU. It was only a trading parner inside the European Economic Area, not a member of the EU.

I read up a lot about iceland after the bankruptcy, since I was facinated about how a) a country could get to that point, and b) how a country could survive such a thing and most importantly c) my fav video game is made there wtf happened?

The whole story is really facinating imo, and I don't think many (if any) other countries could pull off what Iceland did.

I have a sense that Iceland is one of the few countries that can survive going bankrupt and seperating itself completely [for a while] from the rest of the trade world. It has potentially limitless energy from geothermal, limitless food from fisheries, limitless fresh water, and is too cold or far away for anyone to want to invade it -- hence no standing army required.

A bunch of hot spring blubber sandwich eating code monkeys, don't need the rest of the world to support itself.

Most other countries would suffer a disasterous collapse if they could not trade with other nations, even the USA would not be able to survive too long on its oil reserve supply, and oil is what gets food delivered across this country here, trucks and trains, let alone powering stuff. People here would start dying if America declared bankruptcy.

The article wanted to compare Iceland to Greece, I am not sure if Greece is in such an enviable position to survive without any trade from outside its borders. Is Greece energy and food self-sufficient as a nation?

I watched the bbc newsnight programme last night and the various eu comissioners being inteviewed pretty much asking that greece should leave the eu .... but in the usual diplomatic speak that they use

yeah... there's enough oil in Alaska to end the US dependency on foreign oil. It's just those damn hippies holding us back. The caribou will just have to move.

I think they last time they checked there's like 503 million barrels worth?

Not sure the "motherload" is Alaska, the Canadian Tar sands seems to be what most people are looking at now. But it is an expensive process, net energy from tar sands is far less than drills. It's a horrible ratio like 1:3 or something along those lines. Anyway you look at it, it is an increase towards the cost of productivity, that'll impact everyone.

Not only do we need as much oil as all of humanity has consumed thus far over the next 15 years or so, we'll need to find three times as much as the projection, if the net energy ratio is 1:3 and not not 1:10, which is roughly the ratio of sweet crude.

You would nationalize America's oil reserves? Who are you, Hugo Chavez? Talk about the pot calling the kettle hippie.

Who in their right mind would dump America's oil reserves on the world market to drive down oil prices? You would make more money by holding onto it and selling gradually. Even then, there's the whole problem of refinery capacity. Dumping American crude on to the world market wouldn't make a big difference since refining capacity is pretty much maxed out. Finally, if you did decide to dump your US oil, everyone else would lower their prices to the point that you might not make enough of a profit to cover the expenses of ramping up the drilling of US oil in the first place.

tl;dr - it's not about solving the "US foreign oil dependency" problem. It's about solving the "how can private companies maximize profits from US oil reserves" problem.