The Black Gold - priceless or too pricey?

The Black Gold extractor is coming to town. Gigantic and proud.

Malaysians in general (or Bolehland people acc to Zaidah :P) are very sensitive to the oil price movement. We ought to be watchful since the shops and the bus operators are practically waiting for that tick off to increase their price (or is it profit?). For people who "makan gaji" or "kulikutif" like yours truly, the impact on fuel price increase is hurting deeper and deeper into our pocket. Travelling to office one-way for 50 minutes every day used to cost RM300 per month. Thanks to the recent initiative to reduce government's subsidy, it now costs RM440. Compare that against the one time subsidy declared of RM625. Do the math. That's just on transportation to office cost.

It is a chain effect. Went to Tesco yesterday and my friend Yati complained. "The Koko Crunch is at RM14.00?? Dah ambil letak balik". Yup, that same brown box used to be RM8, just a few months ago. Let's take a look at the baby's milk powder. Once, the plain boxed baby's milk used to cost RM22. Now, thanks to scientific R&D, add another DHA, SA, GA, etc etc coupled with enhanced marketing brouhaha, the same box is enhanced to look like a brand new package, but with price tag of RM34. Do they really add up the DHA, SA, Folic, GA, etc etc only God knows.

Oh, 1 UTM student complained, bus ticket JB-KL used to be RM25, it is now RM40++. Wow...our value of money is indeed getting smaller and smaller at a faster pace than I have ever expected.

The Black Gold or commonly known as oil, fuel, hydrocarbon, etc is now hovering at USD140 per barrel. I remember 10 years ago when I first started to have meetings with clients, 1 of the conversation topics was how further down we expected the oil price would be. It was at USD10 per barrel, rumours had it that it would go down to USD5. Perhaps what will be the oil price 10 years from now? And how is it going to affect us? One thing for sure, the earth is running out of oil supply. That is why the Gigantic and Proud extractor pays a visit to my office to undergo major repair work, so that it can extract more and more oil from the earth's crust. FYI, we seldom received visits from these species as they are always in the other part of the world where oil extraction is a sunset industry but nowadays, it's a common sight to my office. Looks like waters in this part of the world is also depleting in resource and requires such structure to be deployed.

Some economics brainiac claim that the USD140 per barrel is a bubble waiting to be burst. The other camp says that the price will reach USD170 by August 2008. Whatever happens, we suffer. Perhaps it's time children who used to eat Koko Crunch by Nestle change to lower grade cereal - like the generic brand with the hyper market's label. EUWWWW...kesian...