I want to take a momentary break in the discussion of the future price of oil, disintermediation and the Future of Today to express a personal message of thanks.

Yesterday this blog received kind words of recommendation from Stephen J. Dubner on the www.freakonomics.com web site.  As practically any reader with any amount of world awareness and intellectual curiousity knows, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” is not only a best selling book, but a wonderful and unique look at the world.  Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have produced one those books that change …

I wrote the last post, “Remember When Gas Was Cheap?” a week ago. I based my predictions on both looking ahead and on research regarding the history of gasoline prices in the United States. In that post I predicted that gas would be $7.33 in April of 2009 and that oil would be at $137 a barrel. More immediately I predicted that when the July 4th weekend came around, the traditional start to summer driving vacation season in this automobile centric country, that the average price of gas would be $3.60.

As almost any futurist will tell you, making specific predictions …

[Readers please note that this post is written as a post to the blog April 20, 2009]

Remember when gas was cheap? Remember back in 2006 when gas was just above $3.00 a gallon and it was the top story on the evening newscasts? Well that now looks like the ‘good old days’.

Yesterday the June 2009 futures for a barrel of oil was $137 and the national average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. was $7.33. Oil has now been over the $130 mark for six months, and during that time the average gas price has been around …

Disintermediation was one of the buzz words of the late 1990s when Internet 1.0 was filling people with euphoria about how the world would change. Within the context of that time, Internet evangelists were saying that the Internet would largely eliminate the transactional middleman. This clearly came to pass in the travel industry as people researched and booked travel directly on-line, doing a lot of comparison shopping along the way. This, to a large degree, eliminated the travel agent, the middle man in this case, from the equation. When the airlines saw this trend and cancelled the fee they traditionally …