Disjointed pieces

[magid]

I walked to work this morning, knowing that I wouldn't make it to the gym with farm pickup afterward. It's not enough (I need more intensity, and more range of motion work, too), but better than nothing. A few notes from the walk:

• The drains on the outbound side of the pepperpot bridge were being snaked. I never thought about how they could become clogged, really.
  
• Overheard: one man saying to another, "The one reason a woman would..."
  And just that bit was enough to raise my hackles.
  
• Cloud reflections on the Hancock Tower in the morning, looking from the Public Garden, are pretty neat. I should bring a camera with me sometime.

Some politics: someone forced out of government for not whitewashing data (written up by Fairdice), and Hauntmeister's prediction for why we're in Iraq, version X (Bill Moyers had the right idea (Thanks to Hammercock, among others, for the link.)).

And the government is starting to address the issue of petrol use, given the skyrocketing prices. A campaign to encourage driving less, alternate-fuel cars, or buying smaller cars? No, requirements for the industry to make cars and light trucks (read: SUVs) more fuel efficient. Which makes me wonder why car makers wouldn't automatically make engines as efficient as possible without government requirements. And why people continue to buy gas-guzzlers. The connection doesn't seem to be made in people's heads, according to the poll cited at the end of the article: "A poll conducted earlier this month on behalf of the Associated Press and America Online found that only about 7 percent of those surveyed blamed motorists driving gas-guzzling vehicles for today's high energy prices. Instead, some 30 percent of those surveyed blamed oil companies greedy for profits." While I'm not assuming that the oil companies have my best interest at heart, I can't imagine how anyone could see doubling prices as only adding profits. Finite supply, infinite demand? War in oil-producing regions? Easily-extracted oil mostly gone? I suspect these have something to do with it...

Comments

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

The piece I linked to the other day has a nice, tidy explanation of _why_ the oil sellers do NOT actually want prices as high as they can stand: it could lead to a crash, which they do NOT want, or to too many people using . . . alternative energy, which again would lower the price they could get. So they have a careful balancing act. (People blaming the oil companies rather than average people's misuse of the product is totally misguided. A HUGE portion of the US's consumption is for autos.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Of course oil sellers don't want the price as high as it is now; people start to reconsider using the car. What cracked me up was a Houston Chronicle article a couple of days ago looking into the discrepancies in prices between gas stations, when the prices they quote are all within a dime of each other. They discussed how people were looking for the cheapest gas, and for me, a savings of a dime on a gallon of gas that's around $2.50 or more is just not worth driving around for, being such a small percentage of the price. Back when it was in the low $1s, that kind of differential was much more substantial. Now it's mere drops of gas.

I think a lot of people don't realize just how much their lives depend on cars; it's not going to be pretty when it all crumbles. All those cities with little to no public transportation...

The poll further convinced me that a lot of people don't really think clearly, or educate themselves, or read, or something like that. Really, very sad.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

They probably waste more than they save driving around looking for that savings, too :)

It's not just personal transportation that's going to take a hit: grocery prices - hell, prices of anything transported via auto (semis, smaller in-town deliveries, etc.), which is probably damn near everything, for at least part of the trip. And things made from petroleum products - it's terrifying beyond words how much plastic our world is made up of these days. And going back to groceries: fertilizers and (I think) some herbicides/pesticides are also petroleum-based . . . It is good that there is a growing trend toward growing food organically (which reminds me: calling foods grown with synthetic methods "conventional" has an awfully short historical view of what "conventional" means).

[magid.livejournal.com]

Of course they do. Plus you'd think people would have a good idea of which stations tend to have cheaper gas; I know I do.

I haven't been thinking as much about costs of transporting goods, nor plastics. For the people who haven't changed their habits yet, I suspect that these are too far from immediate to have any effect on them.

Yeah, pretty ironic that "conventional" is pretty much only conventional for some decades of the centuries of agriculture. Yay, organic practices!

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

Near our house are a few gas stations that run "8 cents per gallon discount every Monday" sales. Apparently, as gas prices go up, their Monday business soars. You save the same $1.20-per-15-gallon-tank no matter what base price the gas is, but that's not what people think about...

[magid.livejournal.com]

It's all marketing. So many people can't do math; so discouraging.