Fezziwig
Explorer
Joined 17 years ago
User Profile
User Widgets
All Activity
Re: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
Two points I want to make which may be slightly OT: 1-we all got surprised by the sudden fall in petrol prices, so we should be careful about future predictions. In particular, all the incentives we consumers and citizens gave to oil companies (because of shortaages) are unlikely to return to us as consumer cost reductions. So, don't do it again! Most of the bonuses and profits, etc., went offshore,and we'll never see that money again at home. Billions and trillions. And it's still happening. "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice and shame on me." 2-watchout for "micro-strokes" in your blood system. They can cause you to crash or even lose track of where you are. I first noticed micro-strokes in my 60s when I couldn't complete a sentence. I think micro-strokes are what cause old people to drive up on a sidewalk and not be able to explain it. People die. Your good driving habits and mental alertness won't help you.313Views0likes0CommentsRe: CELL PHONE INTERNET ACCESS
I'm against TV thru the internet because the Packet-switched network is grossly inefficient for Video transmission. As a result, people who are temperate users get saddled with the costs and delays of intemperate TV watchers. If you want to watch a TV or Movie you can pre-load it to your Computer from a BitTorrent site (which will share internet use for all, treating packets fairly). Also, most metropolitan geographic areas have excellent OTA (Over The Air) HD broadcasts free, including commercial TV and Public TV, as well as FM and AM. Cellphone access to TV compounds the problem since telephone speech transmission is inherently low-speed packet transmission: very poorly matched to TV visual live transmission rates. The oligopolies (joint monopolies) that dominate the internet these days simply shift the cost of over-priced communications from foolish TV watchers to the frugal low volume internet user this amounts to a regressive tax: i.e., tax the poor (frugal) to pay the rich (prodigal) user. It's a regressive tax. A reverse Robin Hood. Transmission requirements exhibit a bi-modal distribution: there are a large number of low-speed users at one end, and a large number of high-speed users at the other. Since the carriers are an oligopoly (monopoly) they are free to administer prices as they please, so the low-speed users will suffer to finance high-speed (TV) watchers. It's cheating. It was a big mistake to turn over the internet to commercial enterprises, who, with unerring instinct, found the sure path to extract huge fortunes from technology that was *free* to them. We should have kept the internet in the Postoffice and the universities. Then, the cost would be lower, service better,and Public services would be regularly financed without public subsidies.526Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
LindsayRichards wrote: If they had an unneeded employee that didn't need to be replaced, they should have removed him first. That is the way it works in the private sector. .... Not when I was there, from 1960 to 2003. In my first management job in 1965 I had an extra guy and told the boss so, and he was soon gobbled up by another department, but when I needed an extra hand no one was available! I had a hell of a time getting someone! So I quit telling the truth, just like everyone else. Thereafter, I always had plenty reasons for hanging onto every soul I could. Call me bad, call me evil, but I always got my projects done on time and under budget, and I could prove it! I never met a manager who was willing to giveup people or budget. Not a successful one, anyway. And it costs a lot more to hire a new guy than to keep an old one, especially if he knows the ropes. I once had a guy named "Mac" who was hated by every manager he had worked for because he was so independent, but he was smart and he knew every inch of our products. Once in a while someone would ask me "what are you going to do about Mac?" And I'd say "I'd LOVE to fire him. I'd love to take his stuff out on the lawn and burn it myself. But he's the only guy who knows enough about our whizbang product and the whiskey account to actually get it going! Ask me again when we discontinue whizbang or stop selling stuff to drug makers. I'll take him out by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, throw him in the street, and tell Mac: "...and never come back!". So we just restricted his raises, as punishment for coming to work at 10AM. Then, 2 months later he turned in his resignation and I walked into the bosses office and gleefully announced "our problem is solved! Mac just resigned!" The Boss looked stony, and said "how can we service the new brandy account, it requires 6 more of those whizbangs!" You can guess the rest: Mac got a raise to stay on. a couple years later I left to go with a startup, my boss retired, and then Mac, unmarried and frugal, left to go to a chariity he'd been working with parttime, where he developed a charity solicitation and tracking system that soon everyone else wanted, too, so he formed a successful combine with the charity that furnished all his gadgets and such (including a GM EV2). Now, I think of ol' Mac every time I see the name of those whiskey and brandy makers. As for the company we all worked for those couple of years, it's gone, liquidated by the Eastern capitalists who knew nothing about the whiskey or brandy business, selling off assets like whizbang for whatever they could get. As Oscar Wilde put it "they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing".377Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
LindsayRichards wrote: If they had an unneeded employee that didn't need to be replaced, they should have removed him first. That is the way it works in the private sector. You can't have extra people in case you need them. When you add a new job and don't add employees, that has to mean they had too many to start with. So then, we have no reason to give extra government money to companies to hire employees since they'd just be extra anyway.377Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
John & Angela wrote: San Sebastian Spain. 1.41 for gas. 1.42 diesel. In euros. Just a note. This is our new favourite town in the world. ... Oh, and all the beaches are topless. Gotta love spain. San Sebastian has a terrific Basque festival every year about this time, featuring wonderful baritone singers who've spent the year up in the high pastures singing from valley to valley and hilltop to hilltop with news. I suppose you noticed the 20 or so empty customs shacks at the Spain-France border, courtesy of the EU. Biarritz is also beautiful, especially for golfers.165Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
LindsayRichards wrote: All of the Canadian oil from that area is presently coming to American refiners and being sold in the US. If sold to a non-captive refiner it is sold at the low raw material price, not at high priced retail. The foul ingredients that make the raw tarsands cheap are extracted and dumped into USA air, water, air and offshore waters, and the sweet refined products sent to China at high prices. It is finished oil (and or cracked products like machine oil, petrol, kerosene, etc.)that is valuable and makes it fungible, not the******that made it cheap tarsands. We will eat the******and China will get the sweet stuff. LindsayRichards wrote: Rail cars (owned by Warren Buffet) are being used to carry the oil now. and it's a horrible situation as they de-rail, pollute, and explode and kill dozens of people at a time. And NO ONE has the political power to stop them from shipping large amounts of explosive tarsands sludge through crowded urban areas as they please. LindsayRichards wrote: The Keystone XL will be used to increase the existing shipments. Oil is a commodity and is sold to the highest bidder. American refiners will be in the best position to buy it as it is already here and no shipping is involved. Refinery source oil is fungible and sells at the same price everywhere in a fair market. LindsayRichards wrote: We already have over 200,000 miles of large crude oil pipelines in our infrastructure. And these new pipelines will be built by the new ultrathin tubing that is even more subject to rupture than the old standard tubing (which already has a poor record, especially as pumping volume increases and internal pumping pressures increase). The new pipes are chosen to save money because they use less steel and are thinner. They are also made exclusively in China so USA gets no manufacturing benefit. The ultrathins are even more subject to rupture and leakage as pressures must be greatly increased to pump the heavy sludge of wet sand and tar instead of the less viscous sweet oil. And if you like the Chinese steel so much, talk to the SF Bay Bridge engineers about the Chinese steel in their bridge that is failing regularly. Their arms were twisted to reduce steel standards when China couldn't meet USA and international standards. LindsayRichards wrote: The notion that it will not be sold in the US has been bouncing around the internet for years and defies logic. No financial reason to ship it to half way around the world to China, when it can be used right here. Think it through. It can be refined here, but the resulting finished cost will be so high it'll have to be shipped elsewhere. Are those customers going to take our sludge and benzene and tar also? Or must we dump it in our soil and water and air? Who will pay those (externalities) costs and how will that cost be included in end-user cost? Or are we, in the US, expected to destroy our homeland for the sake of this rogue international market?165Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
Greydog 1 wrote: ...It's the old supply and demand thing,... Please explain the "Law of supply and demand." I've been asking that for many years. The closest I've gotten to an answer is that " the market trades at the equilibrium point, which is where the Supply curve and the Demand curve cross". But what if they don't cross, or they cross more than once? Econ students spend coffee sessions pointing out real life situations where such anomalies occur.148Views0likes0CommentsRe: RV Fuel Issues & Prices - Post 'Em Here!
tomman58 wrote: looks like an explosion in electric will happen in the next couple years. Here is a site on the site that has some positive rather than negative thinking. Open Roads Forum > Tech Issues > Tesla Batteries (More News) Link Here's the URL for that article: http://www.rv.net/forum/index.cfm/fuseaction/thread/tid/27753837.cfm231Views0likes0Comments
Groups
Motorhome Group
Join in here to discuss all things motorhomes.Jan 14, 202538,705 Posts
