Friday, June 08, 2007

Ellipses...

I am giving up the word thing after 90. Perhaps someone else I read will take up the cause. We could swap every ten... Ok, I am saying it again, I still don't understand why gas is so expensive... The crew head list goes up tomorrow. And then the weeping can begin... I watched Studio 60 and not the NBA Finals. I wonder what happened... Having five cats is a lot of trips to the vet... The other night I tried and failed again to set up utorrent. I think it hates my router... I wonder if I do Val's porch if I can use it as an excuse to buy a power miter box... Its just too early for Presidential debates, even if it does provide a nice distraction for the mess the current President has us into (messes)... Do you think the people that are hammering the immigration story have legals to clean their house, watch their kids, and cut their grass... I didn't go to the office today. That's one day in a row... Comcast, the devil, the end... Be sure, very sure that whatever you are doing for work or on your own that you take pictures...I thought maybe Scooter Libby would be out before Paris Hilton. He didn't even manage to get in yet... Is there something wrong with the phrase "legitimate faith?" I think maybe there is... Will the internet be the end of porn? The porn people think so. How odd... I wonder these days if there is such a place to go and such a job to get that really allows one to work their way through college... Today I stared at a math problem for the better part of an hour before I found the error, just addition, multiplication, and division. It's been such a very long time since seventh grade... Izzy is in a blogging competition about personal traditions. Maybe I should enter. I wonder what my traditions are... Sometimes you get a parking space in SqHill that's so good it just makes it a shame to leave... This weekend they are closing the tunnel in between work and home. I could have sworn I told the realtor "no bridges, no tunnels" when we started looking at this place... 0-0-31 yesterday, 0-1-33 today; I am going backward...

5 comments:

Raising Them Jewish said...

WOW! I made an Ellipses. I think you should enter- who dosen't want a wooden moose that poops M&Ms!

I think, contrary to you, I have decided that other than tuesdays and M-W of next week...I won't be coming into the office anymore...

Anonymous said...

David,

I could go on and on about why gas is expensive. Mostly it has to do with demand and lack of refining capability and the oil companies are not about to invest large sums of money to increase refining capacity when that would ultimately decrease their profits. Of course there's a lot more to it but you get the idea.

Scotty

PS. Our coop is now making our Biodiesel for about $.70 cents a gallon not including our labor. Since most people consider the time they spend doing it hobby time it's a wash (sorta).

David said...

Ok, but I just don't believe it. If it were about refining capacity then it wouldn't matter what the cost of oil was because the refining would be the bottleneck, and as the refineries that were knocked offline come back online the cost hasn't decreased.

I think we're being ass-fucked.

The more I hear about it, the more I think this is about a loosely organized, or really completely disorganized in any way that would be actionable, but still a group of companies working together to make money.

There is a market and speculators involved here and I wonder whats to keep oil companies from using the speculators to drive up the cost, without it actually costing them, but in the end raising their profits by pushing the figure up. Sort of like what the electrical energy brokers at Enron did with the price of electricity in Cali. Which was also about demand and generating but turned out really to be more about corporate rape.

The price of gas should be simple to figure and yet nobody can explain it simply. That smacks to me of something that is being purposefully clouded.

Enjoy the cheap bio-diesel while it lasts.

Anonymous said...

David,

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of F-ing going on but since most of the American people outright refuse to even consider conservation of any type and we live in a "free market" economy I think that they get what they've negotiated. One of my favorite sayings is "in business you get what you negotiate, not what you deserve."
Anyway, the oil comps are in business to make money! Period!

If you don't like it, do something about it. For every gallon of BD I make and use that's one less gallon of profit they get. Do they even notice that 10-20 of us from this one coop are using BD and not giving our money to them, NO! But who cares I know I'm actively doing something that helps the economy, the environment and me. It's so easy that anyone can make it!

Secondly, James Kunstler has links to two pieces about this very topic on his blog this week. Under daily grunt. I encourage all to check it out.

http://www.kunstler.com/

Scotty

David said...

Isn't there a bigger issue here though? I mean, no disrespect, but I don't think the various co-ops are really making a dent, and if you actually are, how long until someone commodicizes waste oil?

In a very unAmerican way I am really beginning to think that there are certain domains where the public needs to be protected from capitalism. When things are set u in such a way that there really isn't a good option its just too easy for corporate culture to game the system. So, while many sectors work just fine competitively I think maybe a few need a different paradigm: Health Care, Transportation, Communications, & Energy.

I know there actually are alternatives in all those market segments, and that the management of non-competitive systems is problematic (see: Public Education), but in a sort of "you broke it, you bought it" kind of way I don't think the entire US populace can be expected to make the shifts that need to be made on their own.

Not that I know what that means or anything.