So does California have electricity or what?

[champs]

Remember? They had this big problem getting electricity? It all just went away.

On a somewhat related note, Enron just went into the crapper. How?

Last year, fuel oil and natural gas prices went through the roof, even though the price of gasoline remained fairly stable. Word at the time was that it would get worse this year. It hasn't.

The price of gas makes no sense at all. On one lunch hour, I actually saw the going price jump from 1.09 to 1.29 on a store by store basis. By the time we got back, it hadn't quite rippled back to the stations near the office. Anytime a conflict breaks out in the Middle East, you can bet that you'll get gouged on top of the premium you pay to tank up alongside the hoarders. When gas prices got ridiculous this summer, the very threat of investigations lopped 30 cents off the price. Hmmm... Lately, around the Twin Cities area, it seems to randomly swing within a 30 cent range, frequently on a day to day basis. In the morning, it's .95, in the evening, it's 1.20, and the next morning, it's 1.15 -- no, they really AREN'T manipulating prices...

How can the energy industry NOT be the greatest corporate scam on earth? Dotcom opportunists and tobacco companies don't even come close.

[Polare]

On a related note, I lived in Vancouver BC for a few months earlier this year. At the gas station nearest our apartment, the price would vary in a regular cycle throughout the week. On Wed or Thursday (don't recall which), the price would drop to say $.69 CND/liter. It would go up each day until six days later it was ~20 cents higher, then drop again as the cycle repeated. What's up with that?

Remember, when you're talking cents per liter, 20 cents difference ends up being a LOT of money per fillup...

-Polare

[MisterNi]

I used to intern at the Mobil Refinery (now Exxon/Mobil) about three years ago just when us Californians went from enjoying the lowest fuel prices in 20 years to the highest fuel prices in 30 years almost overnight.
Pretty much, the word I got was that one refinery was making over $1million in profits every day because of a fuel shortage scare.
About Enron, I read somewhere Enron started to lose a lot of money since the state of CA decided to stop buying electricity from them. The execs at Enron were pure scum.

[Ragnar Dan]

You're noticing the results of a scam that's been going on for more than a century now. It's called "progressivism." That's where politicians come along and promise you to do your thinking for you, and screw up the world. Of course, when the poop hits the fan, they don't blame themselves, they blame the poor suckers they've been lambasting in order to fool people into allowing them to regulate and outlaw competition in the first place. A great example of this process was what happened in the banking industry (e.g. the S&L crisis, where in 1980 the entire industry was over $860 billion in the red, but by 1989 they'd worked it down to less than $150 billion when the politicians decided their being bought by certain slick S&L operators was starting to make news, so they piled a whole bunch of new regulations on, which made the balance sheets of thousands of S&L's suddenly go from profitable to bankrupt by outlawing huge portions of their collateral, and in the process nearly destroyed the whole industry). Energy is another example. Gas stations used to have huge numbers of completely independent operators. The EPA decided that in order to protect people from a thing which hadn't happened and was easily correctable in court if it were to happen, they'd legislate (yes, that's the unconstitutional EPA, an illegal executive agency, legislating, even though the first operating line in the U.S. Constitution says, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States...") a rule that all gas stations had to have a new type of storage tank which was guaranteed to be leak-proof for some extended period of time. The problem is, the EPA came up with the specs., and single-station Mom & Pop outfits couldn't afford to upgrade in the short time period allowed by the regulations. So they went out of business. That means the market for independent gasoline producers started to dry up, and you saw a lot of independent producers disappear. Now you have less competition, and higher prices. You can blame the EPA, but the real culprits are the Congress who created them, and the press who whore for them and every other collectivist Chicken Little they find.

You want a better world? There's one word to correct almost every problem on the face of the earth: REPEAL. Repeal the laws passed in the 20th century, and peace, wealth, and happiness will result.

[Bruce]

You want a better world? There's one word to correct almost every problem on the face of the earth: REPEAL. Repeal the laws passed in the 20th century, and peace, wealth, and happiness will result.

Bollocks.

[Polare]

You want a better world? There's one word to correct almost every problem on the face of the earth: REPEAL. Repeal the laws passed in the 20th century, and peace, wealth, and happiness will result.

I'm sorry to say that I have to object a bit to this. There's at least a FEW good laws passed in the last hundred years. You know, little things like don't discriminate based on race, gender, etc. That whole "Civil Rights" thing... I'm sure you've heard of it somewhere?

Oh, yes, and there's been a few other good things like antitrust laws... sure, they're not wielded well by the government but they have proved to be useful in the last 60 years at a couple of points...

It's too bad if you haven't heard of any of these "useful" laws. Do you really think that the world will be more "peaceful" and "happier" if there's no laws against discriminating based on race or gender?

-Polare

[Ragnar Dan]

On 2002-01-24 11:41, Polare wrote:

You want a better world? There's one word to correct almost every problem on the face of the earth: REPEAL. Repeal the laws passed in the 20th century, and peace, wealth, and happiness will result.

I'm sorry to say that I have to object a bit to this. There's at least a FEW good laws passed in the last hundred years. You know, little things like don't discriminate based on race, gender, etc. That whole "Civil Rights" thing... I'm sure you've heard of it somewhere?

Oh, yes, and there's been a few other good things like antitrust laws... sure, they're not wielded well by the government but they have proved to be useful in the last 60 years at a couple of points...

It's too bad if you haven't heard of any of these "useful" laws. Do you really think that the world will be more "peaceful" and "happier" if there's no laws against discriminating based on race or gender?

-Polare

I've heard of these laws. As a citizen (and not a subject) of the United States, I am also aware that they are expressly disallowed by the Constitution of my nation. Thus, I know more about them than any of the supporters, who generally live in a vague, gauzy world where truth is subjective and facts are inconvenient.

Why do I oppose antitrust laws? Because I know by my capacity for reason that the most fundamental human right, the one which makes all the others possible, is the right to private property, and so-called antitrust laws directly attack that. And that means, among other things, that such laws are not allowed in the United States. Considering that there has been a greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those who have not earned it since such laws and their follow-up regulations were passed than at any time in the last 1000 years, it's also obvious they do exactly the opposite of their stated purpose. Which was their real purpose from the start.

Why is anti-discrimination law bad? Because it makes me, the owner of a business, a slave. And not the slave of an honorable owner, but the slave of a piece of filth the likes of which did not exist until the 20th century. The government, in the name of anti-discrimination, can order me to hire people from certain government-invented ethnic classifications, or sex categories, rather than those I deem most fit for those positions. This forces me and other employers to become as racist as the officially racist government in service to the policy which is intended to persecute people for the content of their consciences (thoughtcrime) and the actions with their own property, the protection of which is the only legitimate reason governments exist in the first place. Such laws are based on the lawless premise that a job is not owned by the company owner, but by the government, or an applicant. That is slavery.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Ragnar Dan on 2002-02-05 00:40 ]</font>