Gas Prices

In reply to Wayslow :

Once again, this argument becomes perverted. AnthonyGS is talking about obvious market manipulation, and you're bringing up basic government services. Some of which (such as the military and police) have legitimate constitutional basis. And other things- such as waste disposal - are already often handled by private firms successfully in many places. 

I think we can mostly agree that crony government-influenced capitalism is generally bad and the government providing basic infrastructure is generally good?

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

explain how capitalism is bad.  

Dude, Capital vol 1 is like 549 pages, and Imperialism is like another 150, nobody is going to do a better job explaining it on a message forum where we're bitching about gas prices.   

volvoclearinghouse said:

 

I think we can mostly agree that crony government-influenced capitalism is generally bad and the government providing basic infrastructure is generally good?

What many people don’t realize is that capitalism contains within itself a natural tendency towards what people consider Crony capitalism, corporatism, and all the other so-called aberrations of our current economic system.  Capitalism naturally develops in a way that results in collusion between corporations and government.  It is utopian to imagine that capitalism could be divorced entirely from government, as commerce cannot function without infrastructure - roads, bridges, electrical lines, etc.

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Seems like the Democratic Socialist countries in Europe are paying even more that we are for gas, but they are used to that. They don't drive big trucks and SUVs over there and have more mass transit options, and are less spread out than we are. They like to add big gas taxes to the mix, as do states like California.

Of course if you are already in a tailspin it's too late to start redesigning the plane. You give it full opposite rudder and pull back on the wheel, and if that doesn't work, you brace yourself for the inevitable crash.

I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are Dem/Soc.  It has to do with the fact that they haven't waged wars .... I mean "had a friendly military assistance presence" in the middle east since the 50s.  If anything, the Socialist part would tend to keep prices down because it's not rampant profiteering... I mean "capitalism" like we have here.

We also have the strategic advantage of having our own oil should we choose to tap it.  Prices stay lower for us because OPEC knows we have the position of not being a compelled buyer.  We can take our ball and go home, which, when you're the one of the largest consumers of oil in the world, isn't something OPEC likes to entertain.

But why would we clearcut Alaska and drill here for expensive union wages when cheap labor in someone else's desert can do it so much cheaper?

bobzilla said:

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

Sorry, been bombarded lately with the all capitalists are evil and blah blah blah. Todays short fuse isn't helping. 

You're certainly free to have faith in capitalism.  I do as well, but blindly assuming it's the best because it's what we have is like being a Browns fan just because you live in Cleveland.  It doesn't mean they are the winningest team, it just means you like them.

I think capitalism is great, but I believe how we've made laws within the capitalist paradigm have mostly ruined it for us.  There is a reason that the happiest and most economically-successful countries in the world are Democratic Socialist AND capitalist.  If we choose not to embrace some kind of change, then we can't complain about the fallout.  It's not the capitalists who are evil, it's that we have turned capitalism into a vehicle of potential evil with our legislation.

Until some kind of change is embraced, it will just sound like some people are saying "gas prices are too high but I refuse to embrace the changes it would take to fix it, so I'll do nothing and just blame [insert entity who has nothing to do with gas prices] for it."

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

i think of it as our retirement oil.  When the ME runs dry we will be sitting pretty.

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

I paid $4.09 a gallon today. I know it must be more in other parts of the  country.

One of my neighbors offered me his full sized pickup today for $10,500. I just laughed. I'm sure he would like to get rid of it, but I don't want one. 

It is amazing how regional it is.  Depending on the neighborhood in Cleveland it is $4.19 or $4.69.

Stopping for fuel today I noted that the big stations were at $5.55 for Diesel and the podunk Duke where I bought fuel at the same exit was at $5.19.  And nobody there buying The BP down the street from my house never advertised over $5.

I remember in 2008 people were big on the gasbuddy websites like clevelandgasprices.com.  (there is/was one for every metro area).  A station would be 15 cents cheaper and there would be a huge line.

Tried to make my Costco card pay for itself by getting half a tank of their 87-octane crap gas in the van the other day, it was $1.95CAD a litre, which is at least as much as the same grade of gas was at a regular pump a few days prior...

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Yes. Quite regional. The going price for RUG in middle-of-nowhere, Snow Shoe, PA was $4.79.  A bit more near me in suburban Philly.  Diesel is well over $6/gal in both areas.  I put $160 worth of gas into my friend's Suburban over the weekend, but considering pretty much all of my vacation was otherwise free, it was good deal for all. 

We drove PA from the southern border of MD to the northern border with NY this weekend; I saw a low of $4.61 somewhere near the center of the state, with 4.79 near the NY border and 4.69 near the MD border.  So not much of a range.  New York ranged from 4.69 to 4.89.  Where we are in MD is about 4.49-4.59. 

The exorbitant gas prices forced us to re-plan our trip; whereas normally we'd take my truck or her Suburban, we crammed the 4 of us into my Mazda 3 hatch, with a weekend's worth of stuff.  Coming home was rough; we had additional birthday presents and stuff my parents were trying to give us that we had to leave at their house, as we simply did not have the room.  They're going to bring it down to us when they come and visit in a couple of months.  We averaged 37 mpg for the trip (which includes a lot of driving through pretty hilly terrain), and saved about $200 in fuel vs using the larger trucks. 

Gas jumped up to $4.89 today here in central Indiana. 

I've parked the XJR (15.5 mpg) that drinks premium in favor of driving the much slower Prius (40mpg) that drinks regular.

Sigh.   I miss the Jaaaaag, it's a better car in every way, except economy. 

Gas just jumped today.  Some stations raised their prices 40 cents from when I went to work till after.

I know everyone has a certain comfort zone for fuel prices and mine was back around $3 bucks a gallon.   $4.59 is gonna make me start rethinking a lot of trips and adventures.

My Mustang Ecoboost gets about 30 mpg. I'm actually glad I didn't buy the V8. That gets me to work and back on the freeway.

The Motorhome is parked.

On weekends I park the Mustang and ride my Zuma 125 scooter around town. It gets about 120 mpg. Mrs. Snowdoggie is talking about getting a golf cart to go to the store and around the neighborhood. There are a lot of them running around here and not just near the golf course. We are doing staycations this summer.

I won't be autocrossing this year. $50 per event plus the gas to get across town is too much.

In reply to KyAllroad :

Yep. Jumped $0.40 per gallon today here.  (Gas station next door to where I work so I see it every day.)

I read something about Europe agreeing to a severe restriction on Russian imports. Coupled with China easing some of it's COVID lockdown restrictions (thus increasing expected oil demand) popped the price of crude back up to around $120 a barrel, near it's high for the year.  

Speaking of MPGeeze.  In the 70's we saw the national speed limit drop to 55 mph.

Saturday I drove 100 miles to get some parts for a project car in the Passat and on the way there I set the cruise control to 75 like I always do.   Got 26.2 mpg.   Coming back I was in no hurry so I reset the computer and slowed to 70, it returned an average of 29.4 mpg.   This is promising, so since we have a "construction" zone along a stretch of the highway labeled 55 (universally ignored and no workers anywhere) I slowed to 60 and again reset the computer.    Over 25 miles of CRAWLING along at 60 mph my 4,000 lb 300 hp, AWD station wagon returned 38.5 mpg!

Any chance we'll see a return to the national double nickel?

In reply to KyAllroad :

This morning I drove my pickup into work, because I'm picking up a trailer afterwards. I was intentionally very light footed while driving. No instant mpg readout, but the gas needle didn't budge for the 50 mile trip so I suspect it did better than average. 

The danger here is folks driving slower trying to save gas, while others zoom around them either ignorant or apathetic about their fuel usage. I wonder if we'll see an uptick in rear end collisions. 

I guess that's the point of the speed limit, so you don't have such speed disparities. 

we just got the wife a brand new grand cherokee with a hemi/awd - we win the great timing award!

my big block dually has been parked for months, my little gas sipper civic is all we drive

gas jumped 10 cents overnite here, up to 4.79

KyAllroad said:

Speaking of MPGeeze.  In the 70's we saw the national speed limit drop to 55 mph.

Saturday I drove 100 miles to get some parts for a project car in the Passat and on the way there I set the cruise control to 75 like I always do.   Got 26.2 mpg.   Coming back I was in no hurry so I reset the computer and slowed to 70, it returned an average of 29.4 mpg.   This is promising, so since we have a "construction" zone along a stretch of the highway labeled 55 (universally ignored and no workers anywhere) I slowed to 60 and again reset the computer.    Over 25 miles of CRAWLING along at 60 mph my 4,000 lb 300 hp, AWD station wagon returned 38.5 mpg!

Any chance we'll see a return to the national double nickel?

What's really weird is that I actually get better mileage in the Excursion when I'm doing 70-75 than when I'm doing 60-65.

Granted, we're talking about 14 versus 12.... Around town is truly abysmal: 9-10 is about normal.  I've got to take the eldest somewhere this afternoon and I didn't realize when I scheduled it that today was my wife's day to go in to the office.  So instead of taking her car, I've got to take the truck.  That's a 29.5 mile round trip which would be just over a gallon of gas in the 5 but in the truck will be close to 2.5 as long as the interstate portion of the trip is clear and I can truck along at 72ish mph.  Once I have the Merc running again (hahahaha), my costs will drop dramatically - even though diesel is about $0.90/gallon more, I can do 25ish+ mpg on the highway and more like 18-20 around town.

I don't usually pay very much attention to gas prices, but having the mr2 spyder out of its winter slumber is making me happy to get 30mpg on regular despite driving like a jackass. 
 

As far a "who could have imagined it?" that the small business owner driving a full size truck said? Well, anyone who's been paying attention the last 40 years. We've had tons of huge gas price swings and while we had the fun of cheap gas for a while this doesn't seem that wild to me. The wheel turns, prices go up and down, but never as far down as they were. I was just shocked they ever went back down as far as they did from the last big jump. 

Well the day I'd been dreading came and it was time to put more ultra-premium in the 86...$2.30CAD per litre. And now that's exposed the fact that the fuel leak which was supposedly fixed actually wasn't fixed, so I put a big lump of cat litter where it was dripping out last night, and back to the shop it goes today...

I just checked what 2008 prices were, adjusted for inflation. Peak was $5.09 in my area in 2022 dollars, so we still have a ways to go before we beat that. 

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I stopped by the Petrocan last night to see how bad 94 was going to hurt. It's for the race bike and for how much I'm riding these days, I can live with $2.25/L.

I thought it was going to be much worse

One oil industry analyst (sorry, I don't recall his name at the moment) just forecasted $150 a barrel / $6.00 national average for regular within the next few weeks.

The reasons he gave were that OPEC hasn't been able to ramp up supply as much as they thought they could and domestically, we aren't able to ramp up supply either due to labor and construction equipment shortages and because the permits that are being issued are for relatively unproductive / inefficient locations.

Not to be an alarmist but he went so far as to say that rationing may need to be implemented soon.

I get most of my gas from a Costco in Simi Valley, CA where regular is currently $5.89 so at my average of 650 gallons per year, that's $3,829 or more importantly, about $1,500 per year more than what I was spending before prices started ramping up.

If that was the end of it, it wouldn't have a qualitative effect on me but that's not the case, everything we buy has a significant energy component, so this mess is highly inflationary.

Honestly, I'm older, I've already bought most everything I want / need, it's the young people that are in the middle of the accumulation phase of their lives that I I'm worried about.

It makes me wonder if this is a short term glitch or a long term correction. Two of my neighbors bought brand new full sized pickups in the last month. I don't know how they do it. A salesman at the Ford Dealer where I get my Mustang serviced says that 90% of the Raptors he sells are leased and a lot of the F150s he sells involve rolling debt into the loan from a previous vehicle. I see a lot of expensive cars and houses getting financed, re-financed and financed again. It's like a house of cards ready to fall. High gas prices plus stupid expensive rent might just be enough to start the crash.

If these gas prices are long term I see a fewer people driving big trucks to work hauling nothing more than a brief case and a lot more people buying EVs. Will what we see at the dealer change again. Kind of a like a re-run of the middle 1970s when big muscle cars and big V8 cruisers were getting replaced by Pintos, Vegas and Mustang IIs and tiny pickup trucks were showing up at Datsun and Toyota dealers.

I will probably be getting around on this...

For a bit of perspective on where all this money is flowing to (US sources of oil):

Of note of course is that it is a global market, set by global supply, so if it costs $40 a barrel to produce (approximate US and Canada costs, Saudi Arabia is around $10!), anything above that is profit. Is it unreasonable profit?  Well, as noted, it's a global market, set by global supply and demand.

I guess you can at least be slightly comforted by the fact that most of the US money is going into the US and Canada (free toques for everyone!!) and not the middle east.  But to be clear, globally, Saudi Arabia is sucking in HUGE amounts of money now!!

https://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-get-oil-you-may-be-surprised

https://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/the-cost-to-produce-a-barrel-of-oil/index.html