gas at $20/gallon
- Thread starter Toshi
- Start date
no, I looked at some hard data. The days of bill Clinton were awesome. Bush was handed the best possible situation & then destroyed it.
It was easy to get a job, we had a surplus.
It was a dual presidency, Hillary did a lot of work she is well versed in foreign affairs, knows the system...
She can lead.
Things I don't like about her.
White Water
Socialized health care
Gas Tax.
It was easy to get a job, we had a surplus.
It was a dual presidency, Hillary did a lot of work she is well versed in foreign affairs, knows the system...
She can lead.
Things I don't like about her.
White Water
Socialized health care
Gas Tax.
where the hell are you living that you paid 15K for health care? i have full medical and dental for a family and only paid 2500 last year
The reality is we will be paying 20/gal in a few years. Hopefully there will be viable alternatives by then. Oil is a finite resource. As the economies in China and India grow the average standard of living increases. Once 2 billion more people can afford to own a car, if gas is still the standard it will be really really expensive. The same this is happening to raw materials like aluminum and steel and it is only going to get worse. People really need to accept this. Don't buy that home 60 miles from work and think you can continue to make that commute until you retire.
a thought-provoking post from toshi, which i think a number of people misinterpreted. westy stated it pretty concisely.
there are tough lifestyle choices and decisions which will need to be made. a lot of the current US infrastructure will not easily support some of the changes which are looming.
there are tough lifestyle choices and decisions which will need to be made. a lot of the current US infrastructure will not easily support some of the changes which are looming.
People move far away from their jobs because they get priced out of the closer neighborhoods. $700k+ for an under-1000-sq-ft 2-bedroom apartment 'round these parts. Still, I chose to deal with the higher cost of living for the convenience. I walk, ride or take the subway everywhere. I have a car. I put gas in it last month.
Toshi is a hippie medical student... watch how his world view changes after he is finished with school a few years. He is not the first to feel this way but the vast majority will change their ways when they start earning cash, decide that they should have a golf course membership, a big body Benz, and pay their nurses and staff slave wages while they rake in the cash.
People and employers are going to have to change the way they do business and where they are located. It would be less painfull if prices were artificially pushed a little higher now to start pointing people in the right direction than to wait 10 years for some crash/crisis.
My company has spent a lot of money providing everyone with laptops and a million electronic tools to make communication easy. I've asked if I can work from home once a week but I am not allowed. My boss told me he needed me to be here in person, but instead of talking to me he told me this through our Sametime messaging system even though he was just 30 feet away.
I liked RedRabbit better when he kept his ridiculous lack of perspective & lack of a global view in the political forum.
It kept me from having to read through it and making me
It kept me from having to read through it and making me
But there is ample evidence to support the hypothesis that moderate drinking is actually healthier than no drinking.
Don't touch my f**king booze.
You gotta get out of that Hell hole.<snip> I've asked if I can work from home once a week but I am not allowed. My boss told me he needed me to be here in person, but instead of talking to me he told me this through our Sametime messaging system even though he was just 30 feet away.
I'm working from home today... which is good, because we got about 3 inches of snow last night and the roads are a complete clusterf**k this morning.
It is hard to argue my point when I only live 4 miles away. My explaination that I would be more productive unshowered and in my underwear didn't work either.You gotta get out of that Hell hole.
I'm working from home today... which is good, because we got about 3 inches of snow last night and the roads are a complete clusterf**k this morning.
You could tell them to pi$$ up a pole if they don't let you work from home.
someone has hit it on the nose. i commend your parents.
actually i went home, and didn't log on RM until i came in early to the lab this morning. this is my hour-of-work-done break.
thank you for the restatement, westy.
oh, and derek: yes, sometimes i INTEND to come across as an asshole. this thread's purpose is to ruffle feathers.
as long as it's worth it to you, it's worth it to you. simple as that. if metro nyc is too expensive, then people will leave. (it's not worth it to me, coming from someone who grew up on the lower west side.)
watch and see -- i'll still post on ridemonkey if familiar faces are still around.
and fwiw, i come from a family of hippies-who-can-afford-to-pay-their-bills. yes, my parents drive a prius, march in peace rallies, etc.
no, a lot of us got what you were trying to say and do, the problem is that there are a lot of people out there who are just as extreme against captialism that damages the planet and society and do NOT consider the consequences of their actions.
In other words, act or idea, the ends do NOT justify the means.
And frankly, any act or idea that is noble that uses that philosophy is even worse as it's clearly hypocritical and amoral. (eg. bombing abortion clinics).
i'm sincerely having trouble parsing this. here's my take:
the endpoint here is a more sustainable level of consumption, and driving gas powered cars is the proxy for consumption.
the "means" is gas prices skyrocketing out of proportion to inflation.
i am not the "invisible hand" myself, and i don't propose some huge tax. as Westy and others have pointed out, the market will take care of this entirely on its own.
how can you jump from this to a comparison with abortion bombers (and presumably greenpeace activists who blow up ships and their ilk)?
note: Only on very rare occasions I go to WM, but if gas was $20/g I'd be buying just about everything there.
The point is that if this worked as Toshi is suggests, and it drove the economy towards thriving small local shops built right in the community, you wouldn't have to go to Wal-Mart to get everything. All of your groceries and goods would actually be very local to you, directly in your immediate community.
It takes me most of a gallon of gas to get to Wal-Mart and back. At $3, that's not a problem. At $20, it suddenly makes my decision to go there very difficult.
There are certain economies of scale that wold make Wal-Mart even more competitive in that situation. You have to think beyond the level of the consumer and to the distribution network. Small stores require more trucks with more shipments. Toshi's argument could work in places like england where communities have grown up around a small nucleus but in the US which has basically grown around the car required suburban model the Wallymart model would probably be more competitive unless major infrastructure changes are made.
Why not take it step farther and stop buying products made overseas? Does it really matter if Toshi walks or drives to a store if his Apple product purchase of the month just steamed across the pacific after being manufactured in a country with abysmal environmental standards? If people just stopped being such consumer whores the amount of energy saved would be significant in its own right.
what if gas were $20/gallon but an amazon.com-like store (that offered everything) had free overnight shipping and was the same shelf price as wallyworld?
stop being an asshole directly to me -- i'm not picking on you.
on the more general point of buying locally, i've tried: a few years back i walked into the flagship REI here in seattle and asked to see a ski parka made locally. there was a shell made in canada for $350. compare that to a shell + liner made in bangladesh for $125, and probably of equivalent quality, and i couldn't justify it.
on that same adventure i also found out that new balance is almost exclusively made overseas with the exception of its highest-end running shoes (as of ~2004). it's not possible to get a new balance basketball shoe that's made in the US or canada.
Toshi, in a utopian world, I agree with you... A large part of me wants to move out to the mtns, build a self-sustaining farm and watch the rest of the world go to hell (and if gas goes to $20/gal by 2012, it would)... but for better or worse, our economy is a global one... and right now, the technology isn't quite in place to handle that. By 2020? Maybe... if oil costs continue to rise at a reasonable rate, it will give technology enough time to develope viable alternatives.
The problem is everyone wants an quick, single solution and the problems are far to complicated and entrenched for that.
The problem is everyone wants an quick, single solution and the problems are far to complicated and entrenched for that.
The douches that run this city are dumping exorborent amounts of money into "infrastructure"...roads and overpasses
. They let the transit drivers go on strike over a 4 cent an hour raise and have taken 10 years to approve an expansion of the train system that will serve 150 000 more people. Basically, this city is fvcked beyond belief and few people know it...Calgary metro is 50% larger than Rhode Island with about the same population.My community of 15 000 people sees an grand total of 20 buses a day and currently has one elementary school. They are actually building several schools, however, so if I'm still trapped here in a few years my kids might actually have somewhere to go. Plan is to bail out to a smaller town in the interior BC...
I've never understood bottled water, period... I buy it when I have to (on road rides when I need to refill and no tap water is available), but fortunately for me, normal tap water is fine around here.
The example like that that made me scratch my head the most is that the Iron Horse Sunday frames that were built here in the US,
are then shipped to Taiwan to be assembled into a complete bike.
Then shipped back here and sold here.
Its that much cheaper that it makes the shipping worthwhile.
Thats the world we live in.
Rural people living in a global economy.
Technology is the only bailout I can imagine that will keep the world from turning upside down when the oil crisis really gets bad.
Take it one step further.
Are you new to the intarweb?
Please keep in mind that when gas reaches that prices, the alternate mdoes of transportation will also become more expensive due to demand. Ie. bikes, mass-transit, etc.
didn't i basically say that earlier in the thread?
I totally agree with this point. I like Baby steps, most people can Handle baby steps.
Baby steps.
The flaw in that train of thought is that as gas prices go up significantly a much smaller % of those people will be able to afford cars.
At $20/gal every Chinese person will be riding a bike again.
I apologize if I'm coming across as an asshole. I felt causing you to personally reflect on the impacts of the actions you propose would inject a little more reality into your views (which in essence I agree with).
You're right, buying locally is hard. Beyond beer, produce and fish most everything I consume comes from afar.
As westy noted, things will change whether we like it or not. Artificially accelerating that process under the guise of dramatically higher fuel prices only address the media-darling image that SUVs somehow caused this mess in the decade they've been mass produced. What I would like to see by 2010 is a real alternative to oil so that its cost is irrelevent to how we live our lives.