Supply Lists & Summer Reading - Bowman Ashe Doolin K-8: Fill & Download for Free

December 2014 (7th grade): Ugh, I just want to get out of here as fast as I can.June 3, 2016 (Last day of 8th grade): YES I’M FREEJune 6, 2016 (8th grade graduation): Hopefully I don’t have to wear a dress to my high school graduation. BUT I’M FREE.June 10, 2016 (Course selections due): Yes, 2 math classes! This is going to be amazing!August 2016: No supply list? I can just take notes on my computer? YES! It’s like college!August 30, 2016 (first day of school), 7 am: Yes, high school is finally starting! I’m so excited!August 30, 2016 (after getting home): Today was the best day ever! I love high school!October 2016: Wow, the work’s getting hardMarch 10, 2017: Jesus, this sucks. And I’m suck in this hell for 3 years after this? MIT and Caltech, you better have spots open for me.

Let me ask you something: you say that you understand supply and demand, presumably to explain today's prices, but why is it that that is an insufficient explanation for what happened before? What exactly makes you think that past prices "reek" of price fixing?In any major commodity market in which there is a significant delay in the supply response, you will see major boom-bust cycles. Suppliers all try to increase supply all at once in response to high prices, but it takes a few years for those efforts to bear fruit. Then when all of the new capacity comes online it typically outpaces demand growth, and you see a punishing fall in price and a phase of capacity rationalization (i.e., shutdowns) before the price rises again, restarting the cycle. You'll see this in grains, potash, minerals, many markets for chemicals (which I am very familiar with), solar photovoltaic panels, computer memory chips and hard drives... the list goes on and on. In the chemicals industry, where I work, the boom-bust cycle has historically cycled about once every 6-8 years in almost all core petrochemicals around the same time.People were no more being "ripped off" on oil in early 2014 than people were being "ripped off" in 2008 when photovoltaic panel prices were ten times what they are now, nor were people being "ripped off" in February 2012 when titanium dioxide (a pigment) traded at 3 times its current price, nor were people "ripped off" at any point during the half-dozen boom-bust cycles that the computer memory industry has gone through, visible as a sinusoidal oscillation in prices overlaid on the secular trend of price decline. "Ripping off" implies some explicit conspiracy to defraud. Such things are in the long term almost impossible in these types of markets because of a low degree of concentration (in oil, it was once possible but is now only debatably so - more on this later). It should be clear that in all of these cases in industries unrelated to oil that a commodity boom-bust cycle was in play and that the forces were driven by supply and demand.From 2005-2009 there was almost no increase in the supply of oil worldwide. The reasons for this are widely debated. From 2009 to mid-2014 supplies finally began to increase but prices remained high. The reasons for this are widely debated and are unlikely to be settled until a few years from now, but various suggestions have included high expectations of demand growth from emerging markets, high geopolitical risk from unrest in the Middle East, a speculative bubble, a delay in the implementation of new technology, very low elasticity of demand... the list goes on.With oil in particular many have fingered OPEC for keeping prices high. Oil is somewhat special in that for the past 40 years it's been widely considered to be in the control of a price-fixing oligopoly. But OPEC's power has been decreasing since they first exercised it in the 1970s. At their early peak they constituted over 2/3 of world supply, but the rise of alternatives has humbled them and total production is now around 40%. It is possible - possible - to point to the actions of OPEC in the early '00s to explain why prices increased, but not to explain why they stayed high. In fact it is now believed by a good portion of people that at some point in the late '00s OPEC finally lost its mojo, so to speak, and that the traditional price setters within OPEC no longer had the spare capacity to increase output nor any significant capacity to increase prices by reducing output - they are constrained not only by their reduced share of global exports, but also by domestic revenue needs.Source: US DOE's Energy Information AdministrationSo I ask again, why do you accept the explanation of supply and demand now, but not before?

It was back to school season in 2014 at Highlands Ranch, Colorado when we just moved from India to the US. My son got admission in a local neighborhood school named Northridge elementary school. We were given a piece of paper with a school supplies list that looks something like this.We rushed to Walmart to pick up the school supplies. Notice the ‘earbuds’ at the end of the list. Earbuds as we know are used for cleaning the ear or remove wax. But, we were not sure why kids need to have earbuds in the class. We thought they are super concerned about their ear health as well. So, we bought at least three big pockets of earbuds.It was the orientation day at school. Everyone kept the school supplies on their table. We got surprised that nobody got earbuds except us. When we were asking a few questions to the class teacher, she noticed the earbuds and asked us why did we bring them. We told her that they were on the list. She stifled her laugh saying earbuds are nothing but earphones to be used with computers. My wife kept her mouth wide open in shock.It was an embarrassing moment for us and a memorable cultural shock. We laugh our lungs out whenever we think of this incident. Here is a picture that differentiates earbuds in India and the US.Of course, we bought the earbuds later for listening to music and not for cleaning the ears :-)