Sure but it dramatically lowers their profits/revenue, and it will run through their reserves much faster. If they drive everyone out of business at 25-30 a barrel, that'll work for a while (and I'm not clear if even the Saudis or all of OPEC can supply the world's needs without significant investment in infrastructure). Even if they sell it at a low price, there will still be a market above that price for everybody else (at which point Saudi Arabia is just losing money). Sooner or later they'll run out of oil, or they'll want to generate a higher profit margin or more revenue.

There are lots of factors going on here, and you're way oversimplifying them. For starters, OPEC currently provides 40% of the world's oil and about 60% of the exported oil to the international market (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eia.gov%2Ffinance%2Fmarkets%2Fcrudeoil%2Fsupply-opec.php). So a 10% drop in overall oil demand and maintaining the price means they lose 25% of their revenue, given large fixed costs, that's a larger percentage drop in profits.

One thing worth noting: If there's a 40% drop in oil demand, it means OPEC could be shut out of the market. That's unlikely to be true, because OPEC can pump gas cheaper than most, while there are any number of sources that aren't economical unless the price of gas is higher so if gas got down to 1USD per gallon (laughable I know, but conceptually possible, and it has been that low in my lifetime in the US), OPEC might be the only one that can turn a profit, but as they try to drive the price up, the more other sources can generate gas economically, this caps how much revenue/profit they can make... This is why gas rarely gets up to 4-5 USD in the US (at that price shale oil sources become economically viable, and OPEC knows it'll incentivize moving away from oil

There's a tremendous amount of competition in the international oil market, it is just that OPEC controls the biggest bloc and is the most motivated to drive the price of oil up as it is a huge way to draw dollars into their countries. The people who control the last barrel of oil sold get to set the price. So if OPEC isn't the one controlling that last barrel sold. If there were a 30% drop in global oil demand, that'd drop the revenue by 75%, which would apply serious pressure to the OPEC nations where that represents a significant fraction of their GDP. Saudi Arabia facing a 75% drop in revenue will present a serious problem for the gov't and their ability to stay in power.

Also, at least the US has been a major purchaser on the international market, but we also have a tremendous amount of oil we can generate. It is just that we have needed a huge amount of since the early 1970s (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eia.gov%2Fdnav%2Fpet%2Fhist%2FLeafHandler.ashx%3Fn%3Dpet%26amp;s=mcrimus1&f=a). Notice that the US has been trending down for ~2 decades now (peaked around 3.9mil to 2.2mil recently although there is an uptick from the recent low point... to be honest I'm not sure about the units if those are barrels per day over the year or total per year).

Saudi Arabia and the OPEC nations know this. They know they play a precarious game, and that being too greedy will kill the golden goose. They also know the world is looking to move away from oil for various reasons, and that the golden goose is going to die. They'll need to replace that, prior to becoming a modern version of the "buggy whip makers".

That's not really true. Most folks make small scale experiments to sort out likely costs and benefits before they move forward. Look at virtually every engineering model ever built. You'd try to do it on paper/computer. Then you'd expand to a smallish scale model and make sure that the model works are predicted. Lather, rinse, repeat through cheap experiments that move closer and closer to the real thing until you have enough confidence to declare: This is likely enough to work, to justify more investment, or this isn't likely enough to work out to justify enough investment (there's also likely some amount of opportunity cost, if I had to pick between this and curing all cancers, it would be hard for me to decide how to apportion the investment dollars, they're both valuable).

Doing these sorts of studies is a way that can help to validate various models of anti-poverty efforts at a modest cost (as far as I can tell, without public tax payer money). This won't help us sort out the inflationary issues, and larger monetary issues with a system that gives money to people no-strings attached, but it can help us sort through the question of: Will people continue to work? At what level of income would people stop working? If given money will people put it to uses that are deemed "productive"?

Ultimately, these people are finding and putting their money where their mouths are, and investing in small scale experiments to discover the answers to some important questions that should be understood to some degree before larger investments in UBI are made.

The question is: Is UBI going to similar to the discovery of the steam engine in terms of how dramatically it will change modern society? Or is this an even more over-hyped version of the Segway that in 2000 while still in stealth mode was predicted to completely change how cities are laid out? My guess is definitely somewhere in between.

I know which one you think it is, but as far as I can tell, they aren't spending gov't money, and I think data and knowledge in this area is useful in understanding humans, their motivations, and how they react to incentives...

I think if this small investment can show promising results, we can invest in larger scale ones that might show greater value. I've long considered UBI a sub-optimal idea, but I think it is better than the complex array of poverty programs currently used in the United States. So I'd love to see the US explore ideas that end up with more universal benefits (health and financial), as they're more efficient and hopefully accommodating of edge cases.

I don't think it is technically illegal. I believe it'd be illegal if you were required to pay debts in that currency or if it is non-transferrable. In fact, based upon some quick websearches, I think you've got that exactly backwards. Non-transferrable (meaning it can't be turned into US dollars), is unconsititutional if companies are paying you in it. The reason for this is to avoid Company Scrip and Company Towns (where you can effectively turn workers into slaves, as was commonly done in remote areas for mining and logging). It is perfectly legal for folks to barter anything of value in US dollars. If I want to trade little slips of paper for US money, I don't know of any reason why that'd be illegal vs. paying for blank paper or any other good or service.

Search for: "Coal scrip was deemed unconstitutional if non-transferable in the early-twentieth century" in https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... -- They don't have a good citation for the case law.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FList_of_community_currencies_in_the_United_States -- That's a list of currencies that exist and are doing what this article is talking about. So I'm pretty sure they're legal.

Your email isn't publicly available, nor is it accessible via your G+ link.
Mine is a gmail account, less the trailing 'ha' in my /. username.

Travel where?

And wow it's been a while since I posted here. I was quite rambunctious a decade and a half ago, wasn't I :-)

The gov't printed the money, clearly they're just trying to collect their property... </sarcasm>

Perhaps learning calculus is about learning to think in abstract and increasingly difficult (although mathematically provable and correct) realms of intangible worlds.

And software engineering is nothing, if not that.

Take a look at ZTree.
Like TC but totally keyboard driven. I can't live without it.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bing

Turn off the WiFi adapter before putting your droid on standby.
Turn it back on when you wake it back up.
Your standby battery life will go from one day to over a week.

See also, survivor bias.

You'll get a few hits on this one, no doubt. Well, one for sure.
Any chance I could ping you directly with a few questions?

One word for you : Craigslist.
Assuming you're in a locale with decent CL usage, there's no better techno-recycle center.

Honestly I think you have it backwards.

Old school engineers doing it by hand had to know what they were doing.

Noobs with enough experience to 'look good' can have their deficiencies glossed over by the powerful CAD/CAM software, letting them build inconsequential assemblies that individually would work nicely in isolation, but fail as a whole because they didn't understand (or consider) the engineering and physics at the higher level.

Consider the difference between software engineering and programming. An average coder that knows his way around Eclipse can write a hand full of nice classes, but real software engineering by the heavy hitters can happen in a room without a computer - that's where you see the big picture.