Their reply is 100% based on the content of your post.

First, the site isn't bullshit. The underlying inventory problem it's tracking is very real. The IEA's September 11 report says global observed oil inventories have fallen *507 million barrels since February*, more than *10 million barrels/day of Gulf production was still shut in* during August, and global refinery throughput was 4.2 million b/d lower than a year earlier. That's pretty freaking ugly.

However, there is a pretty important distinction between the site's data and the scary probability numbers it puts on the scenarios. The site itself says the probabilities are assigned using judgment, and it specifically warns that the model "wasn't developed by an energy analyst." So I'd regard it as a really useful stress dashboard and not interpret "50% corridor lapse" as if the IEA just announced a 50% probability of catastrophe.

What I found more concerning is that some actual energy experts are now describing basically the same physical problem, just without going nearly as far on the probabilities.

Columbia's Center on Global Energy Policy put out a discussion today estimating the world is currently short roughly *5 million barrels/day* of crude and petroleum products relative to demand. Their point was that the reason this didn't immediately turn into an enormous price spike months ago is because we had buffers everywhere - excess oil, oil sitting on tankers, strategic reserve releases, spare refinery capacity in some places, etc. We're now burning through those buffers. At some point price has to do the work.

And I think "price has to do the work" is the key distinction here.

When economists talk about *rationing through price*, they don't mean somebody is handing you a little card allowing you eight gallons of gas this week. They mean gasoline goes to $5, $6, whatever it takes until enough people decide not to take the road trip, companies consolidate deliveries, airlines cut marginal routes, factories use less diesel, weaker economies consume less, etc.

That's much more likely than literal nationwide American gasoline rationing.

The other thing that surprised me is that *diesel and refined products actually look scarier than gasoline*. This isn't just a shortage of crude. Gulf refining capacity is also disrupted, Russian products are constrained, and refinery margins have gone nuts. So you can theoretically have crude available somewhere on Earth and still have a shortage of the exact petroleum product somebody needs in the exact place they need it. The IEA specifically says the global refining system is stretched extremely tight.

That said, the EIA is still nowhere close to forecasting "welcome to Mad Max."

Their September 9 forecast has Brent averaging *$74/barrel in 2027* and U.S. regular gasoline averaging *$3.35/gallon*, with Middle Eastern production gradually recovering and getting back near pre-conflict levels around Q2 2027.

There is a catch there, though. Their forecast was actually completed September 3, so some of the latest deterioration isn't in it. That's probably why I wouldn't just shrug and say the whole thing is temporary either. The newer IEA report is substantially uglier. Still, even the IEA forecasts an enormous *8 million b/d rebound in global production in 2027*.

So if you're literally asking:

> should I trade my car in for an EV because I might not be able to buy gasoline?

I wouldn't.

If you were already going to replace the car anyway, though, I think this absolutely moves the needle towards an EV, especially if you can charge at home.

You're basically buying yourself some insurance against this entire category of bullshit. Strait gets closed? Iran attacks tankers? Saudi pipeline gets blown up? Russia stops exporting diesel? Oil hits $150? You care considerably less.

Wood Mackenzie actually published something on September 11 making essentially that broader argument - that persistent oil-price volatility could accelerate EV adoption because the advantage isn't merely a lower average fuel cost. You're also removing most of your exposure to oil-market shocks.

But if you've already got a perfectly good paid-off gasoline car, dumping it and buying a brand-new $40,000 EV solely because you're scared gasoline will be rationed seems like exactly the kind of panic trade where you somehow manage to lose more money avoiding the crisis than the crisis would have cost you.

Basically, my read is:

*Expensive and unusually volatile gasoline for a while? Very plausible.*

*Diesel/refined-product shortages getting seriously nasty? More plausible than I realized.*

*Localized shortages if things get worse? Definitely possible.*

*America running gasoline ration books for years? I couldn't find any serious institution treating that as the expected outcome.*

The part of this I'd actually keep watching isn't even the price of oil by itself. It's whether Hormuz tanker traffic recovers, whether the Saudi bypass pipeline comes back, whether Gulf production starts returning, and most importantly whether inventories finally stop falling.

If those things start improving, this probably looks like a brutal but temporary energy shock.

If another few months go by and we're still draining hundreds of millions of barrels out of inventories while the physical routes remain screwed up, then I think the depletion.org people start looking considerably less alarmist.

When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.

I doubt they even intended it to be, but it seems like I kept going from resorting to 3.5-3.8 (over time) to realizing that Claude and GPT, while great at Python, will make rudimentary mistakes with R; even when they compose giant complicated R code.

I don't recall them doing polls for commission like almost every other poll does.

I've fed into several models my past reddit comments (with the comments it's responding to) and asked it to duplicate the style. Claude has always been the only thing that comes even close to original responses that even I think would be exactly my response, wording and all.

GPT or Gemini will just borrow snippets from the example text and just smoosh it together to make semi-coherent points. Scratch that. They're coherent, but they're just unmistakably not from me.

Also, I get caught up in multiple errors that will never go away and, since I'm stepping out of my wheelhouse with libraries or packages I'm completely unfamiliar with, I'm completely helpless but to diagnose what went wrong myself and improve upon my code prompting skills.

Don't get me wrong. AI makes possible many things for me. However, I think professional coders probably accomplish much more.

When I would look at Copilot's searches, it was as juvenile as what my grandma would type right after I taught her what a search engine was.

Appears the "OPEN" light was on in July of 2021 from street view.

That's a weird expectation. But I think, for starters, that the reason you don't see it often is that when it comes to jobs working with your hands, you'll find that incredibly costly accidents by employees overwhelmingly occur within the first few months. I've seen it while a technician at Verizon and also for the local transportation agency. A new hire is an investment where you take on massive risk to start with, and you recoup costs incurred after the first few months when the risk dramatically falls.

It's an excellent language, I think, for many reasons. One is that you can work with data within hours because even before learning what packages or classes are, you got native objects for data storage, wrangling, and analysis. Even import my Excel data and rapidly learn the native function cheat sheet so fast that I was excited to learn what packages are because I couldn't wait to see what I could do.

That was my experience in like 2010, maybe, and after having C++ and Python go in and out my head during college multiple times. I view R as simple only because I actually felt more helpless to keep learning it than helpless to ever learn coding at all. Worth noting that I was a Stat/Probability tutor with a Finance degree and much Excel experience.

I keep hearing this, but it's incorrect. While I only know R, which is obviously a simple language, I would never type out all my code and go without testing to ensure it does what I intended before using it regularly.

So I can't imagine someone that knows a more complex language just typing out all of it before integrating it into business systems at their work or anything else before testing it.

Why would AI be any different?

Why the hell are AI skeptics acting like getting help from an LLM would involve not testing anything? Of course I test it! Why on earth wouldn't I? Just as I tested code made by freelancers I hired on commission before using the code I bought from them. Do AI skeptics really not test their own code? Are you all insane?