The general counterargument is that our economy is based on moving goods around, so higher gas prices mean higher everything prices.
Jessie Jackson used to argue that the price of gas was negatively related to the price of blood, so maybe if you need to get some surgery high gas prices help.
There are a host of interesting psychological reasons that we care more about the price of gas than the prices of most other things. Lots of things, particularly grocery store stuff, and clothes, fluctuate in price much more than gasoline. But you usually buy gasoline as the only item in the purchase, and it's always the highest price item, so you notice what you're paying. You buy all of your grocery stuff together, so it's much less noticeable when a particular item goes up in price. You can't stock up on gas when the price is low, and you can't hold off on a purchase until the next time it goes on sale. You have very limited oportunity to switch to a lower price, lower quality brand when the price rises. And even when you're not buying, you see the prices posted all over the place. Media attention to the price of gas is probably more a consequence of the others reasons than the cause.
The median U.S. family has discretionary income of barely $2,000. That trivial $10 per week increase is equal to a quarter or more of discretionary income for half the country. You can kind of see how that would suck.
Not that I'm blind to the benefits of higher gas prices. Personally, I'd like to see gasoline taxed much more steeply, with about a quarter of the revenues invested in transportation infrastructure and three quarters returned to consumers through lower payroll taxes.
Agree with 3. Also, men buy gas.
(Did you NYCers hear that as real men buy gas? Good.)
The median U.S. family has discretionary income of barely $2,000. That trivial $10 per week increase is equal to a quarter or more of discretionary income for half the country. You can kind of see how that would suck.
Nothing in the news is genuinely aimed at the median US family earning $46K/year. It's all aimed at the UMC family.
3 is along the lines of what I was thinking when I wrote the post, but better phrased and more informative.
From the bike nerd site I read because I like to go jogging on the trails they got built.
-- If American drivers replaced just one four-mile car trip with a bike each week for the whole year, it would save more than 2 billion gallons of gas.
That would be enough saved gas to make it cheaper for me to buy.
Nothing in the news is genuinely aimed at the median US family earning $46K/year. It's all aimed at the UMC family.
Even if that is true (and I'm not sure it is), that doesn't keep people in that bracket from paying attention to the news anyway. The administrator in my office has a 50-mile commute (one way), and her income is such that she only sometimes orders out for lunch on Fridays with the rest of the office, depending on how she's doing that week. She reads Yahoo or CNN news all the time.
My mom used to drive miles out of her way to save .03 on a gallon of gas. It mystified me.
Fair enough. It's not that it doesn't have an impact on poor people. It's that it's totally inconsistent with the media's general lack of outrage at other factors that translate into larger costs for poor people.
Around here, poor old people seem to drive the media coverage much more than poor young people.
and her income is such that she only sometimes orders out for lunch on Fridays with the rest of the office, depending on how she's doing that week.
Although this isn't necessarily that informative - I would do the same thing.
Not that I doubt she's watching her budget closely.
Gas prices disproportionately affect people who are 1. economically stable enough to have a car, 2. unable or unwilling to live in walkable/transit accessible locations and 3. young enough to have a daily commute (or daily child are responsibilities). Those people watch a ton of TV and, not incidentally, listen to a ton of radio, and are age-wise right in the demo news people look for; why wouldn't the media play to them?
I mean, it's not like the media covers public transit fare hikes.
16: Fare hikes get big media play here. Also, the pending route cuts.
Gas prices may disproportionately affect them, compared to other groups. But as a fraction of their budget, there are much more important things the media could focus on than that possible $10/week.
Obviously, 3 is why. I'm just saying.
The general counterargument is that our economy is based on moving goods around, so higher gas prices mean higher everything prices.
This isn't true in any meaningful sense. Business logistics costs are less than 10% of GDP, and about half of that is non-transportation costs (warehousing, inventory carrying cost, etc.). If you further break down the transportation expense, the fuel component ranges from around 20% (air) to up to 35% (long distance motor carriers). So a 50-cent jump in the price of gasoline (which would be perceived as huge by consumers) would translate into something like a 0.2% increase in cost of goods sold. That's not nothing, and it would be enough to show up in the inflation statistics and in the bottom line of fuel-dependent companies. But it's not enough to trigger rampant inflation.
Also, I am baffled by the idea that an UMC family of four could painlessly swing another hundred bucks a month (two cars). I mean, they're already deep in debt.
I'd argue that if you can't painlessly swing a couple hundred bucks, you aren't UMC or you are really whiny.
How does $10/week/car get you to $100 extra per month?
I can't tell if 20 was kidding or not.
Further to 5, and have done since they were teenagers. All us old men can name a lowest price we remember seeing -- in my case 29.9 cents (in my childhood, I'm not sure I ever paid less than 75 cents) -- and can spout that, without remembering what wages were then.
Old white men can't tell you what most consumer goods cost way back when. Movies. Their first car. (Mine was $400, a little overpriced . . .)
Anyhow I think part of the issue is that people think of gas prices as a fixed cost. Which is stupid, admittedly. And related to 3.
(in my childhood, I'm not sure I ever paid less than 75 cents)
Actually, I remember paying 89 cents/gallon. As a driver, not a passenger.
I remember paying less than a dollar in 2002.
Further to 19, a jump in fuel prices does have a noticeable effect on the price of certain very transportation intensive commodities. But most most of these (lumber, gravel, coal, road salt) are not especially salient to consumers.
One exception is citrus: oranges and lemons really are a lot more expensive than they used to be (though fuel is only part of the reason).
Although this isn't necessarily that informative - I would do the same thing.
The detail was included to indicate that she's not someone who has "enough discretionary income to eat out for fun 1-2x a week."
For the first five years that I had my license, gas was predictably around $1.05-1.20. One summer it plummeted to around .90ish. I got my license in 94, so sometime in the mid-90s.
28. That is about what I remember for a low price. Gas when I started driving was much cheaper than the prices before.
And you could buy an Apple computer for about $2,000.
I started driving before the first '70s gas crisis so routinely paid low to mid 30s (and probably a high 20 or so if there was a localized price war). I do recall filling up ~25 gallons right after it went above 50 cents for the first time and the attendant saying, "That puts one hell of a hole in a twenty." Chart/table of historic prices.
"We could use a man like Ronald Reagan again."
I believe RR, Jr. is currently available.
British people looking on, amused.
Petrol is a little over $8 a gallon here. [That's US gallon, not UK]
I remember driving through NJ when gas was $0.999. But I probably only remember because it was a round number. They should post gas prices in base 2, then when there's a change no one will be able to understand when the price changes.
Have we discussed before the fact that gas is the only consumer product I'm aware of that has the gall to price itself down to the tenth of a cent?
Also, you have to be commuting 30-40 minutes each way to run through a tank of gas a week. Not that a lot of people don't do that, but.
I got my license in 1974 -- post Yom Kippur War -- and drove for the first few years in California, where it's long been more expensive than most other places. I was in San Diego earlier this month, and paid $4.51. Price the next day here was $3.71
I can remember as a child waiting in line at the gas station on our designated days (was even-odd or some other system?) during the gas rationing of the late 70s.
I also vaguely recall the howls of outrage when gas first broke 1 dollar /gallon.
Yeah, I was amused a few weeks ago when an otherwise reliably left-wing relative posted complaints about rising gas prices. There are fairly good reasons gas is more expensive than it was 20 years ago, and it's still much cheaper than the rest of the developed world, so what exactly does anyone expect? I probably would have posted an extensive rebuttal (but polite!) if someone else hadn't done so first. This person doesn't have too much economic acumen in other ways, though, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
...during the gas rationing of the late 70s.
I can remember the late 70s, but I don't remember waiting in line for gas. My mom would just pull into the full-service station. Maybe the lines were only in cities?
I also vaguely recall the howls of outrage when gas first broke 1 dollar /gallon.
I recall that as well. The posted prices on the pumps dropped by half overnight, because the dials did not go past 99, so the filling stations temporarily converted to selling gasoline by the half gallon.
We also wore onions on our belts.
45 -- Remind me to send you an email when you have a couple of teenagers.
50 -- I never waited in line in the late 70s. I thought at the time it was just Eastern cities.
I mean, you know, any more than I wait in line now.
I remember being in the car with Mom once, waiting in line for gas, when the guy from the station came out and hung the "No more gas after this car" sign on our back window. That was weird.
Still, it's annoying and distracts from good arguments that the price of gas should be allowed to rise.
Too bad these price increases are caused by higher global demand (running into supply limits). That is, these prices aren't causing a drop in emmissions, except maybe locally.
47: I was in Houston during the Iranian crisis gas shock. Lines were a feature for a fairly short period of time. Everyone topped up near the beginning, so the "rolling reserve" increased quite a bit at the start. Looking for, but not finding the average state of fullness of people's gas tanks--I'd guess more than half but less than two-thirds.
Although I presume that everyone here is in agreement that it's totally fucking dumb when the media reports new price records in nominal terms.
55: Probably got weirder once your mom drove off with the sign still there.
on our back window
Did your Mom do a fist pump?
55- Thank god Guiliani got those guys off the street. I mean, you turn on your wipers to stop them and they still won't go away.
57: I only saw that stuff on the news. Still on 9/11, the first thing I did was fill the tank on the car.
@50, 53
This was in Los Angeles. If any place was going to need some sort of rationing system, I suppose LA was it.
Everyone was assigned a certain category, which I think was even/odd, and people in each category could only by gas on specific days. I was pretty little at the time so I don't remember how long the system lasted.
One exception is citrus
I would think groceries in general would be sensitive to gasoline prices, but I'll defer to your expertise.
I only buy oranges that have been injected with 93 octane.
Everyone was assigned a certain category, which I think was even/odd, and people in each category could only by gas on specific days.
Similar to watering restrictions by house number.
It annoys me that not only do nominal earnings records determine the headlines of articles on financial successes of films, the articles typically don't even have information on the real earnings. Avengers looks like it's on pace for somewhere between 20th and 30th best ever.
Also, you have to be commuting 30-40 minutes each way to run through a tank of gas a week.
Not really. The average round trip daily commute is about 25 miles, or 125 miles in a five-day working week. Commuting accounts for a little more than a quarter of household vehicle miles. So your average car owner is filling up a bit more than once per week, and commuting just 22 minutes each way.
66: When they put toilet flushing on alternate-side of the street restrictions, that was the worst.
The Boston Globe does a report every year about the number of public MA employees making $100k or more. And the count goes up every year! Government run amok!
Commuting accounts for a little more than a quarter of household vehicle miles.
As an average, no? This would not be the case if you're actually doing the 30-40 minute commute (and it turns out the median commute is 46 minutes). You wouldn't have the time to drive 3x more of that, on top of that.
it turns out the median commute is 46 minutes
Round trip, heebie. Round trip.
Average commute is 46 minutes. Median is 30 minutes.
Still, you're claiming that someone who drives 125 miles per week commuting is piling on an extra 400 miles per week doing additional driving? Are we just talking about taking monster road trips on vacation or what?
73: Really? I get that the average and median are often different, but that's a huge difference. There must be a lot of people commuting three hours one way to drive up the average like that.
Still, you're claiming that someone who drives 125 miles per week commuting is piling on an extra 400 miles per week doing additional driving?
An extra 375 miles, to be precise, but yes. On average, anyway. Feel free to register your skepticism with the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
76: Do the statistics actually say that overall miles commuting is unrelated to the percentage of driving that is commuting? Because it seems to me that you'd expect those to be negatively correlated.
And by "negatively" I mean "positively."
I'm kind of curious how "commuting" is defined. When I worked at the newspaper, my commute was a five-minute walk, but I probably drove more than 20 miles in an average day for work-related meetings and events. Now, my commute is about 40 minutes from door to door, but I probably go straight home after work less often than not. I'll bet grocery shopping counts as part of a commute if it's just a tiny bit out of the way, but what about going to dinner just a tiny bit out of the way? What about going to dinner well out of the way?
What Moby said in 77. I'd expect big commuters to do little else, and low commuters to do a lot more driving.
600 miles of driving per week! What on earth.
Do the statistics actually say that overall miles commuting is unrelated to the percentage of driving that is commuting? Because it seems to me that you'd expect those to be [positively] correlated.
I'm going to concede that Moby and Heebie have a point. If we look at it from the perspective of the average car, which travels a little more than 10,000 miles per year, that works out to needing a fill-up about every other week.
re: 81
That's close to what I do if I'm driving to work. I alternate so I don't drive every day, but in weeks when I do, it's 600 or so.
82: except that statistics for the average car are presumably held down by the largish number of cars that are seldom driven at all. It would be informative to look at the median vs. mean of those statistics.
That's commuting, not on top of commuting. I'm probably misreading the numbers here.
Just as I was resolving to drop out of the U for the day, and maybe get some work done, my paralegal came in to check if she could leave early to go to her elementary school daughter's presentation on whales. I waxed nostalgic about an old friend-of-friend, an Inupiat whaler, and went to look for that Youtube video from last year (or the year before) of his crew pulling a whale up onto the ice. Instead I found this article, which is both on vaguely point and a fun read.
85: Are there really more cars that sit than cars that get driven a fuck-ton (taxis, police cruisers, delivery vehicles, etc.)? I have no idea, but certainly a large number of cars are moving nearly continously for 8 to 24 hours a day.
85: agreed. What we really need are the mean weekly total miles traveled by the median automobile commuter. Alternatively, the median one-way commuting time of drivers who drive more than about 20,000 miles per year. Either way, we need some kind of distribution to test the truth or falsehood of heebie's original claim.
I'd expect big commuters to do little else, and low commuters to do a lot more driving.
I'd expect big commuters to be likely to live a longer way from everything, not just work.
(The word I should have used for the article linked in 87 is amazing.)
Or unaware that the link doesn't work.
88: well, sure, I'd think so. The top 300 vehicle fleets include a total of 1.2 million vehicles (per here), as compared to 255 million registered passenger vehicles overall. Even if only 10% of vehicles are second cars that are rarely driven (seems likely to be an underestimate? I know plenty of people with more than one car) and the total fleet number is ten times higher than the one I listed that's more than twice as many rarely-driven vechicles as fleet vehicles, and of course a lot of fleet vehicles (rental cars, for instance) don't actually get driven terribly much.
Rising petrol prices are adding to the screwed-ness of various people who bought houses way out on the commuter belt around Dublin, planning to suck up the travelling for a few years until they could sell and move in closer. Now their houses are in negative equity, their incomes have probably dropped and the cost of the commute means they're paying out as much as if they'd bought the dearer, closer house in the first place. For reference petrol is about 165.9c a litre and diesel 157.5c. (Really cheap diesel will turn out to be laundered agricultural diesel and will destroy your car engine.)
I'd expect big commuters to be likely to live a longer way from everything, not just work.
This would be my parents. Both retired now, but their commutes were 35 and 75 minutes. They will happily drive an hour to eat at a crappy chain restaurant.
94: Right, but second cars rarely driven doesn't mean those cars have nothing to do with commuting. We have a second car rarely driven but it is what I use to commute when I do commute by car.
97: sure, but they do cast doubt on statistics for the average car as a useful metric in this case.
I was going to paint the car, but that turns out to be really, really expensive.
Right, but it's a pain to put that into a prediction, because all comparisons are done in nominal terms. You can see that it's beating The Dark Night at the same time in its release in nominal terms, but then you have to do some calculations to see how it compares in real terms. Knowing where it's at currently is not so interesting, it's the prediction of where it'll end up that's more interesting.
89.last: What was heebie's original claim?
I confess I've completely lost track of what this has to do with the OP, which was either complaining that higher gas prices are no big deal [to the top half of the population], or that mainstream media should stop covering rising gas prices because they don't care about any other things that are a big deal, so they should just stop talking about it for the sake of consistency.
This formulation is weird to me:
Given that we, as a society, rarely care about things being expensive for poor people
Society is being defined here as the top, oh, 20%.
The Dark Night
A city terrified by an unstoppable villain... a populace that has given up hope... their only hope of redemption: clouds, or possibly moonlessness. And fewer streetlights.
If you have a ten year old Civic and enough money to buy 6,000 gallons of gas, you can never have to worry about the price of gas again.
we, as a society
The oudemia bat signal was mentioned yesterday; is this the AWB bat signal?
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/8607-one-bad-ass-eskimo-part-2
87, 91
I saw an olds (I think?) hot rod electric conversion in a shop once. It was being built for Tommy Chong. Super rad car. Plus, built-in vaporizer!
I saw Tommy Chong in front of the federal courthouse just before he got sent to prison for selling bongs.
they do cast doubt on statistics for the average car as a useful metric in this case.
Possibly a better metric is vehicle miles per household -- about 20,000, according to the DOT (National Household Transportation Survey). Assuming the average vehicle has a 16-gallon tank (that's just a guess -- small cars have smaller tanks, SUV's have larger tanks), and average fuel economy of 23.8mpg (average of cars/light trucks on the road), that works out to be a bit more than a fill-up per week for the average household.
Interestingly, households with children travel more than 2X the vehicle miles on average than households without children -- see charley's comment in 52 above.
If the newspapers are reporting nominal earnings, does that mean that Hollywood moneypeople will be thinking about nominal earnings when deciding how much money to give Whedon for future movies, or are Hollywood moneypeople smarter than the newspapers?
Your fun wikipedia fact of the day re: the 1979 gas shortage:
Due to memories of oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier during the 1973 oil crisis.
As the average vehicle of the time consumed between two to three liters (about 0.5-0.8 gallons) of gasoline (petrol) an hour while idling, it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m³) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
Really cheap diesel will turn out to be laundered agricultural diesel and will destroy your car engine
Is that really true, or just a myth that the government propagates to discourage tax arbitrage? My father used to use the same diesel interchangeably for agriculture and motor vehicles, until they exempted ag diesel from a fuel tax increase, and started adding a dye to it to inhibit black market diversion.
Gas prices get attention because they're one of the two big regular non-discretionary retail purchases, and gas prices are one thing while with food there's a lot more complexity and opportunity for substitution.
For the poor, gas increases are doubly bad because the easiest way of decreasing them since car efficiency improvements take a lot longer to help them than they do those who buy new or newish cars.
Query: Why haven't we seen a boom in NG powered cars with the increase in gasoline costs and the decrease in NG costs? The conversion of a petrol powered one to NG is pretty simple and cheap. There's tons of NG cars in Poland.
114: Yeah.
I think ag diesel in the U.S. is also exempt from the new ultra-low sulfur requirement, making it a bit cheaper to refine than highway diesel. But I don't think the sulfur poses any danger to your car -- just to the atmosphere.
Ag diesel doesn't damage engines - I've never heard of such a thing.
115.3: People around here keep trying, for obvious fracking-related interests. There is one NG station open to the public but I've seen the numbers run. For normal driving, it would take years to pay for the conversion and I think people are nervous about the price of NG staying low long enough to pay for itself. There is a grant to get the buses to run on NG, which seems like a very good idea to me because I don't like standing next to the diesel ones.
117: it doesn't sound sound totally implausible to me that the process of laundering the ag diesel (i.e. removing the tell-tale red dye) could change the chemical composition of the fuel in a way creates risks for your engine. But that's uninformed speculation.
112: the 1979 gas shortage:
Yeah, the whole thing caused some stress in my relationship at the time. I was in Houston, but the rare soul there who could go full walk/bus. But I had messed that up by dating someone who lived a fair ways out. So during the "crisis" neither my own lack of willingness go get in some stupid long line nor my advice that my girlfriend avoid it as much as possible were greeted with enthusiasm.
Nor was my ill-concealed amusement at the spectacle of it going down in Houston fucking Texas. Full disclosure: I was employed in the oil industry at the time.
(I linked part 2 of that Palast article, because it's about the oil business in Alaska. Part 1 is more about my friend, and more fun than amazing.)
Nor was my ill-concealed amusement at the spectacle of it going down in Houston fucking Texas. Full disclosure: I was employed in the oil industry at the time.
Did you have one of these on your bumper?
118: CNG buses do not seem to be a good idea, based on experience around here. They're something like twice as expensive as diesel buses, require a separate fueling and maintenance infrastructure, and have a lot of limits on where they can be driven - they can't go through tunnels, or under anything where leaking NG might collect and detonate. Switching the regular diesel buses to ultra-low sulfur fuel, and maybe upgrading the fleet to have catalytic converters (made possible by the ULSD) is cheaper and easier.
it doesn't sound sound totally implausible to me that the process of laundering the ag diesel (i.e. removing the tell-tale red dye) could change the chemical composition of the fuel in a way creates risks for your engine
All you have to do is filter it through a loaf of bread, I believe.
125: And then use birds to filter out the bread crumbs.
Total vehicle miles per capita topped off at about 10000 in 2005 or so and has since decreased to about 9500.
126: It's the bird feathers that foul the engine valves.
123: Nah, I was totally an unassimilated Yank. My adult life's early path through Houston astounds me to this day.
Still on 9/11, the first thing I did was fill the tank on the car.
Are you being serious? If so, at what time during the day?
124: I never heard about the tunnel risk being higher with CNG. There's certainly no sign about it not taking CNG vehicles in the tunnels here. There are at leastsome tunnels where it is allowed.
130: After I left work at the usual time. I didn't rush out.
Still, I bought gas before buying food and ammo even though I had half a tank.
I'm sure nobody has any idea what's going on.
OT: Any thoughts on a response to Balko's robust defense of the fallout from Citizens United? In which we're reminded that free speech is a sacred right?
I don't like standing next to the diesel ones.
There are diesel buses where you live? What sort of savages are you? Do you also wear skins and club each other?
133: That still seems kind of gross and heartless (and unexpected from you, my dear Moby). Not buying gas if you needed it, but worrying what tomorrow's price might be.
||
Semi-OT as it involves a vehicle.
As the article says the jokes write themselves: A drunken man with a macaw and a zebra in his front seat and a bar known as the Dog House Lounge in Dubuque, Iowa.
|>
Which comes to only an extra $200/year for a $0.50 cent/gallon increase. Less than a dollar a day.
137: I assume the concern was availability rather than price.
136: Yes, the boring kind, no.
137: I wasn't worried about the price, I was worried about short term shortages.
I hate getting pwned on my own thoughts.
I've studied your habits; I know what you're going to do before you do.
Which comes to only an extra $200/year for a $0.50 cent/gallon increase. Less than a dollar a day.
That's per capita. The cost per licensed driver is about 40% higher, and per household twice as high.
Wait, you can't say that the cost per licensed driver is 40% higher and per household twice as high. In the first you're discounting children, and in the second, counting them full strength.
For less than $1 a day, you can help this harried middle manager move 2.6 more miles into exurbia.
Obviously, children don't get to full strength until at least 13 or so. Not even crossfit can speed things up much.
I knew you were going to say that.
I have no idea what argument 145 is making. There are fewer households than there are licensed drivers, and fewer licensed drivers than there are residents. Ergo, fuel cost per household is higher than per licensed driver, which in turn is higher than fuel cost per capita.
140, 141: I suppose that makes sense, but I don't remember having room in my head to even think about something like that, never mind act on it.
I thought you were saying we can take the total mileage and divide it up over just licensed drivers, since there's always a driver in the car, and saying you get a cost 40% higher. But then I thought you were saying, alternately, we could count a family of four as a household, and get a cost twice as high as if we just did the two licensed drivers. That seemed like shenanigans.
Otherwise what's the point in claiming that households are twice as costly as per capita?
Looking it up it seems I was wrong about Poles using NG cars. They use LPG ones, about two and a half million of them.
Well, for one thing, income is usually reported by household, and not per capita. IOW, that $0.50/gallon increase results in an increase of $400/year/household, which should then be compared to the median household income of about $50000/year. If you go per capita then the numbers are $200 and $27000.
152: Those smell like grilling before you put the food on the grill.
IOW, that $0.50/gallon increase results in an increase of $400/year/household, which should then be compared to the median household income of about $50000/year.
So, less than 1% of a household income.
I'm definitely not arguing that median families are not on a tight budget! I'm just saying it makes more sense to pour our media angst into something that would more substantially affect their well-being.
Obviously, psychology of comment 3.
So, less than 1% of a household income.
...or 20% of discretionary income (psychology of comment 4). That's a big deal.
Gas ought not be categorized in discretionary budget. Housing costs are really eating up their discretionary budget, too. So is my monthly electricity bill.
157: I do not think that is relevant to knecht's point.
My electric bill is discretionary, laydeez.
I'm not sure what that means, but it is safe to say that it was not relevant to anybody's point.
I'm just saying that the $400/year/household of increases in gas is swamped by plenty of appalling expenses that the media doesn't report on very often. Every single day we hear about gas prices. That's a hell of a lot of talk about gas prices.
I really never hear about gas prices. I was surprised they were so high when were in California recently.
There's a gas station a block from our house but I have no idea what they're charging for a gallon of gas right now.
I'm going to guess somewhere between three and four bags of pork rinds, which go for 99 cents at the liquor store.
it was not relevant to anybody's point, laydeez.
You can get a bigger bag of better pork rinds for the same price at the supermarket, but that's a couple of blocks farther away.
It's been 99 cents a bag as long as we've lived there. I don't remember what I paid for pork rinds when I lived here in the '90s, but needless to say those pork rinds would look dated now.
Maybe you watch too much TV.
I don't even have a watch!
(Of course I do. It drives me bonkers if I don't have my wristwatch on.)
I've never heard the price of pork rinds discussed on TV.
165: You can't get any fried pork products at liquor stores up here. No liquor in the grocery stores, no groceries (not even limes!) in the liquor stores, thanks to the competing demands of each industries lobbyists in St. Paul. Ah, American capitalism, will you ever rise, unfettered, from the sink of depraved communist regulation in which you now wallow?
I would buy pork cracklin's if they were for sale near my apartment. I think they cost a little more, but they add that layer of fat, so they're a good value.
172: even though they're so close to the canonical futures commodity.
I like to buy the pickled pigs feet. They're a real value because I don't ever eat them.
the process of laundering the ag diesel (i.e. removing the tell-tale red dye) could change the chemical composition of the fuel in a way creates risks for your engine
KR is absolutely correct, and I have family and neighbours with the bills for engine replacement. They used to buy diesel from a garage right beside the location in this story. http://www.ibec.ie/ibec/press/presspublicationsdoclib3.nsf/2ACF8686274C6708802575F20030C085/86E6AD3818D429C1802579CF0030CEA8
Fuel smuggling has also usually been a cross-border thing with paramilitary connections.
Part of the problem is also that there's not much one can do in the short term besides fill up the tank. I can cut back the grocery bill (and I hear a lot on the news about food prices, too), or turn down the heat, but if I need to commute 40 miles round trip every day and gas spikes, there's not often an easy way to cut back. Sure, take public transportation, which around here, if it's available, probably adds two hours to your commute. Most people are locked in.
178- Car pool?
My favorite irrational gas pricing is the station next to the Watergate. It's something like $1 to $1.50 more than the one right across the street (last time I was there 3 weeks ago it was something like $5.69) but I guess people still go there for some reason. Taxi driver said it was because it's full service and a lot of old people live in the Watergate who don't want to pump their own gas.
177: huh. I stand corrected. OK, red diesel can't harm your engine but laundered red diesel can (presumably it changes the flashpoint or something).
I knew that fuel smuggling was a big Provo thing, I didn't know it involved red diesel - thought it was just about taking advantage of lower fuel duties in the ROI.
During the second world war, a relative of mine was in the business of secretly buying fuel from the quartermaster of a US 8th Air Force base, filtering it through cement to remove the telltale dye, and selling it on the black market. War profiteers ftw!
I have a vaguely worked out theory that public concern about petrol prices is a sort of pathological substitute for concern about wages. Being exercised about median incomes is something for radical weirdos; GET IT DOWN BROWN* is what the Real People think, according to the people who are paid to tell us so.
See also: hellholey semi-dictatorships that sell petrol for tuppence (Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, Texas) as the only benefit of citizenship.
*possibly the most idiotic newspaper bullshit of the 2000s?
A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.
Do people who buy fuel on the black market really care of it is dyed or not?
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Occasionally I am compelled to boggle, just boggle, at things that I read.
And then I have to link them here, to punish you all for living in a society that can produce things like Kevin Williamson's discussion in the National Review of how the GOP was "The Party of Civil Rights" during the '60s.
This piece has been sufficiently mocked in other places, but I wanted to highlight an offhand bit of mind-bending cognitive dissonance, from the section where Williamson's enumerates the reasons that the South abandoned Democrats:
Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call "Democrat wars" (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).
Yes, Kevin, anti-war sentiment was one of the things that drove Southerners to the Republican Party.
Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest. Carry on.
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185: very much of a kind with Williamson's article is the new book by R. Emmett Tyrell called "The Death of Liberalism." I caught a good portion of the CSPAN discussion on it and he trotted out many of the same weird reinterpretations of the pertinent history. Particularly the interesting periods circa '48, the late 60s and early 70s. Just bizarre.
185: See also "Liberal Fascism." Everything good is from 'conservatives' and everything bad comes from liberals.
Do people who buy fuel on the black market really care of it is dyed or not?
The penalties if you get caught are very high -- thousands of dollars.
So yes.
I was thinking of the seller being concerned about fooling the consumer, and forgotten to that both the seller and buyer have to worry about getting busted.
179: it's even less rational than that.
That actually sounds pretty rational as long as you don't assume that losing money to fuck with someone you hate isn't rational.
But the dude setting the wholesale price is not being rational at all, as far as I can tell.
I guess maybe they both are motivated solely by hatred of each other. I'm not sure "rational" would be my go-to descriptor there.
I'm assuming the guy setting the wholesale prices isn't actually jacking up the prices, or at least isn't jacking them up higher for this station than the others. They mention a lawsuit that the retailer lost.
179: ... it's full service and a lot of old people live in the Watergate who don't want to pump their own gas.
It's not an irrational choice if they're balancing the money against their own energy and pain levels. Those are choices one has to make increasingly often.
193: If they are both really spiteful people, they're getting value for their money. (Cue long discussion from graduate school about how "rational" is either a useless tautology or a fruitless quest to define what people should want.)
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D.C. area Mineshaftians: I know of an intern looking for a room or apartment to rent from June through September. Something close to where he'll be working near 17th & Rhode Island would be ideal, but mostly he just needs to find a place.
E-mail me at mypseud at gmail if you know of something or can post on any listservs. Thanks.
(Cyrus, I don't know this guy, but maybe he can make himself offensive enough to, say, drive out a squatter.)
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Who did you have to know to get "blank"@gmail.com?
You can't imagine how powerful.
But that was me.
Dammit. Why is Firefox suddenly forgetting who I am?
Because your lastest movie went straight to DVD.
180; I think it's a case of both/and, since either way they have the infrastructure for storage, the tankers, the bandit country location usw. Quite possibly the harm to vehicles has increased either from an arms race with dye changes or just that modern diesel engines are more dependent on those lubricants which are stripped out.
179: I have a very short commute (and I bike about 30% of the time), but carpooling seems to me to be wildly impractical for a lot of people. Dropping kids off at daycare? Running errands? Trying to combine trips on the way home?
In bandit country, you have to watch your step.
Cherry-flavored Skoal? In pouches? What kind of candy ass uses that?
Firefox, why hast thou forsaken me?
It's probably just the thing to get the taste out of your mouth after you've been siphoning diesel fuel.
203 to 201. You don't have Private Browsing turned on, do you?
It's not an irrational choice if they're balancing the money against their own energy and pain levels. Those are choices one has to make increasingly often.
I am familiar with the case of an oil company in a semi-dodgy country that created a chain of branded premium filling stations where the consumer value proposition was that you were less likely to get mugged, raped or kidnapped. It was targeted at UMC female drivers, and featured things like adequate lighting, security guards, and female station attendants. They were able to command a (slight) premium for gasoline.
No, but I did, I'm now realizing, erase a bunch of personal history and form information a couple of days ago because someone's laptop got stolen from the office. Mystery solved. (OK, Kraab, now go check the little box down below.)
the consumer value proposition was that you were less likely to get mugged, raped or kidnapped.
Like Target over WalMart.
You don't have Private Browsing turned on, do you?
No, I'm gay. End of DADT, doncha know. Also, it's "Private First Class Browsing" now. I've been promoted.
184: the point of the dye being that the police could stop you on the road, dip the fuel tank, and immediately know it was ill-gotten (then) or untaxed (now).
I get it, but it never occurred to me that, as a practical matter, the end consumer (i.e. the person with the fuel in his or her car's tank) was under a serious risk of being caught.
OT: Fuck. This promotion I just got? My immediate boss in my new role just announced that she's going to be out indefinitely for maybe medical reasons, which means that I'm going to be doing her job. I'm not dead sure what the parameters of my new job are, let alone doing hers without warning. And our mutual boss, who I'd normally be leaning on in this context, is just heading out for a two week vacation. (There's another supervisor who should be some support, who's out today but will be in next week.)
If the place doesn't burn down, I'll end up looking good, but this is going to be tense.
Congrats on the promotion, sucker!
the consumer value proposition was that you were less likely to get mugged, raped or kidnapped.
Pretty much the same reason that London taxi drivers give for charging twice as much as minicabs.
205: bandit country in a Norn Iron context = South Armagh and other border areas where Republican terrorists were most active and their sympathisers most widespread. Esp. the town of Crossmaglen (XMG as it was known). Well known for culvert bombs and hilltop watchtowers, which were one of the first things to get taken down (on PIRA insistence) after the Good Friday agreement - presumably because they interfered with the smuggling.
I can't not read the title for this post as "Gas prices are on the growl". Shouldn't on the growl be idiomatic for something? Maybe like 'on the prowl' but meaner?
Now I'm trying to figure out what Ludacris would rhyme with "Blaow! Gas prices are on the growl"
213: Like Target over WalMart.
I was in a Target last night for the first time in probably 25 years. Damn was it big (and confusing--I don't get out much). And I did not get mugged, raped or kidnapped so you're right.
Was it the brand new Target in East Liberty?
No one out in Harmarville. Right by my gym.
Pfft. That one doesn't even have an escalator for shopping carts.
an escalator for shopping carts.
There's got to be an OPINIONATED MITT ROMNEY joke in there somewhere.
I've been thinking about opening up a retail space to compete with a small, locally-owned, neighborhood-based store I've been patronizing for over 20 years. Not very left-anarchistic, I suppose, but I am fed up -- FED UP! -- with going in there all the time and never being able to find what I want, despite the fact that there is a brisk internet trade in the exact same type of items which they should be stocking, but don't.
Obviously, the stumbling block here would be my lack of capital. I am convinced that someone else is going to realize the potential for this concept before I can find the financing too. Frustrating.
Maybe you have a minority taste in pron?
230: Actually, if I was really going to do this, my first stop would be getting general business advice from my friend in the retail adult products industry. She's a huge local and national success story, and I certainly would not want to try competing with her.
If it's a comic book store, when you look for money and advice, tell people it's a porn store to avoid the stigma.
217: If the place doesn't burn down
Drive a bulldozer through the office to create a firebreak.