Ok, so here's the Mary and Ed moving plan for tomorrow:

- 11am-12pm, start moving at our apartment (#79, 5215 110 Street)
- move things to 6203 127 Street (our new place)
- eat pizza, consume various beverages
- watch hockey, or not, depending on your preference

If you need to get a hold of us, please call my cell, 264-3218 or our home, 988-1643.

Thanks so much to everyone who said that they would help!

I should say MechEs are expendable now because there are too many of us. When the oilfields slow down there will be less desire to be a mechE and therefore we will become less expendable. Kind of like any skilled trade or profession.

Well Par the economics of a fivefold increase in production does not necessarily mean an increase in pay. First the person owning the company will see an increase in profit and wether (sp?) he wants to share this profit or not is up to him.

The design of most oilfields are pretty much set a few years in advance. A fivefold increase in production will mean instead of buying 1 wellhead I designed they will basically buy 5 wellheads.

( A simplistic view for the lay people but basically they already have a field plotted off. They know what type of wellhead they want to put where. A fivefold increase of production means they just have to put wellheads on 20% of the oilfield instead of 4% of the field if it was "normal" production. They could very well extract all the oil off the field in one shot if they wanted but by holding back capacity they are able to keep the price of oil up and get more money for there effort. A good example of this would be Brazil where when oil was only $30 a barrel it wasn't worth it to extract the oil (They had to use an expensive method to extract the oil) When the price went to $50 a barrel they were raking in the money so they decided to extract.)

There is no increase in workload to design more wellheads, I basically work the same amount of time. So I'm working the same amount of hours, why should the owner pay me more? All wellhead companies are pretty much like this, so why should they want to pay an engineer more? Poaching? Don't think so, too many mechanical engineers, we're basically expendable. Only when we actually have 6+ years of experiance are we actually worth something. By this time the salaries have pretty much stabalized across the board so it doesn't really matter who you work for. Unless you are in management or something I can't see any way for you to be raking in the big money.

So to summarize: onwers make more money, workers no.

Well whatever, they treat me well here so I'll be at Stream-Flo for a while still.

Man, I should just skip the first period of every Oilers game. I turn on the TV, see a fight, then two goals in 30 seconds to give them the lead. Then they actually go out and add to rather than give up their lead and, breaking with tradition win against Anaheim.

Also, does Roloson have a different mask this year from last year? This is the mask from last year:

I'm surprised we hear of an urge for fivefold expansion of our oilsands production, but nothing of what Par already outlined: infrastructure, manpower, housing, services. There's nothing in this oil summit for the people of Alberta. Any manpower shortages will be filled by foreign workers: remember this? I have no problems with foreign workers, but c'mon! There are plenty of people trying to become police officers in this province and we're giving the positions to English bobbies??? No takers from the rest of Canada I suppose. Maybe we should import Trump for our infrastructure as Alberta is such a terrible province to live in.

I don't know, Albert. My simple math says that if there's five times the activity in the oilsands, there's at least some increase in the demand for, as an example, mechanical engineers. Given that there's a limited number of MechEs, if Streamflo isn't paying you more to retain your services, someone else in need of MechEs may well poach you from them for more money. Either way, an sizeable increase in oilsands activity affects you pretty directly.

I am, of course, neither an economist nor a mechanical engineer, so my view of this may not be terribly firsthand. I'm more than willing to be enlightened about why I'm wrong about this particular point, though.

In any case, the general point I would make about why this is a colossally stupid idea is that we simply don't have five times as much everything that we need to support that kind of expansion. Never mind the blatantly obvious environmental consequences (which we seem to do often enough), but we're pretty stretched in terms of infrastructure, manpower, housing, services, etc. with regards to the oilsands as is. Quintupling the activity out there dumps an anvil on that proverbial camel that's one straw short.

Again, though, I'm open to finding out why that wouldn't be the case.

IF you see me driving around in a Nissan Skyline GT-R then it is pretty direct trickle down. I doubt this will happen so no I think the trickle down isn't as great as some people put it out to be.

And to keep with my work brain being on I'll change my analogy:

The trickle down will be like 1000 psi of pressure trying to get thru a 5,000 psi rated BOP ram, the primary viton o-ring seal of the tubing hanger and the secondary plastic injection seals. (For you laypeople out there that pressure isn't going to get thru.)

Al, don't you work at a oil wellhead company? That's some pretty direct trickle down.

Most of Alberta's economy is based on oilsands development (which makes you wonder why we're in such a hurry to pump it all out as fast as we can with no regard to environmental impact or long-term sustainability (enviro or economic)) so just by living/working/studying here we are benefitting from some small amount of trickle-down. So we're all dirty.

I just read a really interesting book (The Golden Spruce) that talks a little bit about how people who are living in an area that is being environmentally raped for short term economic gains react. There is something of a mentallity where you feel like these resources are getting exploited so quickly that if you don't get in there and get whatever you can grab now as quickly as you can, then in 10 years your area will be ecologically destroyed, and you won't have benefitted from any of it while you chould have. And he was talking about logging on a small island off the west coast, where you could walk to the top of a hill and see that all (not just some, but all) the forests had been clearcut. So in Alberta, where very few see these oilsands projects first hand, how do we get people, especially oil and gas people who don't live here, to slow down or take an interest in the quality of land left over?

ps - big congrats, eric and taylor!!!! That's super exciting.

Paras, you're making me look like a loser. Stop it.