weirdness on the news

[miriam_e]

Most afternoons I turn the radio on for a 5 minute piece called Perspective, where a variety of people give a very short talk on some topic dear to the heart. Normally I turn it off again straight afterwards because it is followed by the news and I find it too skewed and depressing these days to bother with. Today I was doing something and didn't turn it off immediately and heard a couple of gems:

"the company was remorseful"

Some guy was injured working for Energex and he took the company to court. Apparently some total knucklebrain told the court that "the company was remorseful". How unutterably stupid is that? Companies don't feel anything. They are fictitious entities, developed (as I wittily heard someone say recently) so that people can obtain profit without being held accountable. Some of the people in companies can feel remorseful, but the company definitely can't.

"oil prices have been falling for years"

This was very strange. We were told that oil prices as dollars per barrel had been falling for years(?) and that OPEC nations had decided to cut back on production to increase prices again. Huh? Maybe I misheard the timeframe. If price per barrel has been falling why have the prices we pay been going up? Or need I bother even asking? Is the term "skimming"?

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Oil prices have not been falling for years.
I'll have to DL that perspectives.
In real and adjusted terms oil prices have been in an upward trend since 1999 - they have to keep revising the forward curve.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Nope, it was the news after Perspective. I could have got the time frame wrong, though I was pretty sure I'd heard it right at the time. As I say though, I wasn't really listening. It was only on because I was too busy to turn the radio off. I don't normally listen to the news. Even the Radio National news has become unreliable recently (in my opinion).

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Strange. Oil prices have been falling for the past two months or so, but since September 11-ish, and definitely since '04 they have been trending north.

The Iraqi oil minister is in Australia at the moment, I wonder if the statements were somehow related to that...