600 mile range Federal law needed

Not in the Portland metro area.

Banks does not see the PDX-to-coast traffic as it's not right on US 26,
everyone
has filled their tanks long before going by there, that's a low-volume
station.

Canby is not on a major arterial, most people use I-5 not 99E, once more
it's
low-volume

Most people buy fuel in Salem before hitting Brooks, it's low-volume

Yamhill you have got to be kidding, there's no major arterials out there,
few
people, a very low volume of gas sold, plus they are probably paying extra
for hauling a tanker out on those roads.

All these are very small markets, and are remote, it is no wonder your
seeing
pricing rise - there's no competition. Those stations are
pumping low volumes and they are already paying more for gasoline than the
higher
volume stations in Portland, and your seeing those station owners being
opportunistic
now.

McMinnville is closer to PDX which is why your not seeing that big a
variance from
the average PDX prices, there's too many people who already drive from there
into
the metro area via 99W. If you were to go another 15-20 minutes into Tigard
you
would see cheaper prices.

I'll see tomorrow what the 76 I usually buy from off US 26 is charging, on
Friday
it was 2.66 The stations along 26 are a lot higher volume than
along 99W so they are buying a lot more gas at lower wholesale costs.

As I said, the Oregon attorney general needs to be shot for permitting the
oil
companies to violate the Sherman anti-trust act in most cities in Oregon
after the
last round of mergers. I guessed that sooner or later we would see gouging
going
on.

Ted

 

That's the real reason - you won't find it on record anywhere though. In
any case what would you rather have done with the unemployables - do
you want to support them on your tax dollar? I certainly don't. For what
the state government would bite out of my taxes to support the
unemployables,
private industry in gas stations can do it at a quarter of the cost.

That's the "official" reason that everyone knows is bullcrap. There are LOTS
of
official bullcrap reasons that are used all the time. For example, when
Iraq needed
to be invaded in order to remove a brutal human-right violator and his 2
insane
sons from power, the official bullcrap reason given was WMDs which everyone
with any intelligence knew at the time was a huge fat lie. Unfortunately
the feeble
minded that couldn't handle the truth needed some bullcrap to believe in
which is
why the WMD reason was dredged up to begin with. (of course, the problem
now
is that they can't come right out and say that the objective has been met
and thus
it's OK to go home, and they haven't come up with an official bullcrap
reason
to use to justify getting out of there that won't tear the veil to the
feeble-minded
and show those people that they knew the WMD reason was a lie at the time)

This is SOP for all governments, why are you upset about it?

Most stations also allow motorcycle riders to fill their own tanks.

Ted

 

Before you go off half-cocked, know they have developed solar cells
that decompose water directly and can produce hydrogen and oxygen
directly from seawater and sunlight, no electricity is involved, not even
within the cell itself.

That doesen't of course negate the storage problems and make hydrogen
even remotely usable for vehicle fuel, but it does pretty much blow away
the 'takes more energy to produce it then you get back" argument.

It took more solar energy to produce the oil deposits than we get back
from them, also. The difference is that you can pretty much assume that
solar energy is unlimited on the Earth and available almost everywhere,
so even if we can only generate a watt of power for every 10 watts of
power in sunlight that we get, since
the sunlight is free, after the initial cost to setup, there's no continuing
costs for the raw energy.

Ted

 

Yes in the Portland metro area.
You ought to look around before you make such statements.
http://www.portlandgasprices.com/

I guess I should have specified, ALL the places in between too, Like
Aurora, 3 stations right across the street from each other on I-5 (also a
major truck refueling stop)
Wilsonville, Tigard, Beaverton, Aloha, Hillsboro, Cornelius, Forest Grove,
Clackamas, Milwaukee, Oak Grove, Portland, ETC. ETC. ETC.

FYI:
I monitor Fuel prices quite closely, and Canby and Cornelius consistently
have some of the lowest prices in the greater Portland area...
http://www.oregongasprices.com/
http://www.portlandgasprices.com/

 

Yes.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Exactly - that was the point of my previous post. The thing we can't do
is plug a power cord into the wall to do these
inconvenient-to-convenient energy source conversions. The most obvious
way to do it is to capture power from the sun that is essentially one of
God's gift to mankind. However, you just wait - environmentalists a
hundred years from now will come up with a reason that we can't do it,
or that it has to be very heavily taxed to discourage its use. They'll
quit talking about our mother the earth and start talking about our
mother the sun or the great sun god or godess that we have to respect or
some such other crap.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Yes, and that energy was integrated over a fairly long period of time as
best we know. It is hard to replicate that now so we need to look for
means of using sunlight in "real time", not things that take years to
store up to get a day's worth of energy in return.


Matt

 

Don't laugh everyone... In an argument (family discussion) we put forth the
idea of launching nuclear waste to the sun..(however fraught that is with
all kinds of *other* problems among them an explosion showering us with
nuclear waste...) one of the kids came up with

"NOW YOU WANT TO POLLUTE THE SUN" !!!!

So Bill there it is.. !!

 

No, not in the Portland metro area - again.

Look at the site's chart here:

http://www.portlandgasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Note the average price 8/27 - 8/30 was 2.60

Look at today - the top 15 stations on the front page of
the site are at 2.63 - 2.66.

Where is this price jump in the Portland metro area?

Your looking at their average price rise - the problem is that their
average does not represent a real average of a price per gallon because
the stations aren't reporting their volume.

Some of the low volume stations in PDX are using the hurricane
as an excuse to gouge, that's all. 2 weeks ago the spread between
high price and low price was much smaller. Now those low volume
stations are skewing the average.

This is what they mean when they say statistics lie. We have a spread
of 2.59 for the low and 3.15 for the high - a whopping 56 cent spread.
The stations that are gouging 50 cents a gallon extra will get away with
it for a few weeks then everyone will stop going to them and when they
start losing money they will drop the price. 3 weeks ago I would guess
that there was no 56 cent spread on that site.

Sigh. Go back to that website and start looking at the top 15 again. Let's
see,
Clackamas, Hillsboro, Portland, Beaverton Damascus, Linnton.

I would guess Not Anymore. I suspect your favorte stations are just using
the hurricane as an excuse to gouge. We are going to see a lot of that I
think.

Truth is I have been rather surprised to see this at certain stations -
I've seen
stations with a 10 cent difference in price right next to each other in the
last week,
so has my wife. Previously the biggest difference we have seen was 3 cents
in these instances. And some of the stations that I've avoided over the
last 6 months
because they always ran 3-4 cents higher are now lower. For example the 76
right
next to my house has always been 3 cents higher than the Shell down the
road,
now it's reversed.

I can understand fuel price gouging when there's fuel shortages but we don't
have a shortage here, I've yet to see a gas station with a sign out saying
they
are out of gas.

Cool site though, I'll have to start reporting the stations I pass daily.

Ted

 

What would really make sense, is making vehicles that don't use gasoline, or
at least very little of it. I say we should have cars that get 100 mpg or
better. Bush gave billions of your $$$$$$ to the oil companies but should
have given it to those who would find alternative fuel sources instead. Then
we wouldn't be fighting wars in foreign lands for their oil, and our
National Guardsmen would be home to protect our cities during a time of
crises like we are seeing on the news channels 24/7.

 

Oh please!! So where was all that money for alternative energy going
before Bush?

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

FYI:
Aurora and Brooks have the cheapest diesel 2.89 in Oregon today...

 

Use a really, really, really BIG magnifying glass! ;-)

I think the oil-creating process that took a failrly long period of time
was probably on the order of .000000000000000000001%
efficiency. It's impossible to calculate of course, since we don't
know how many hundreds of gallons of plant oil had to be produced
for one drop of it to find it's way down thousands of feet of rock and
sand into an oil dome. But clearly, we should be able to do a lot
better than that with solar energy.

Ted

 

You've been listening to George Carlin again. ;-)

Ted

 

It's not finding the sources that's the problem, go outside and look up and
there it is. It's developing the alternative ones that have an ongoing cost
of
operation that's cheaper than just digging oil up out of the ground.

Consdier also that if the US ever seriously did that, that the Mid East oil
producers could easily drop the price of a barrel of oil down to $5 a
barrel or some such - they might have to give up a few solid gold
bathroom fixtures to do it - for long enough to make sure that such
alternative
sources would be throughly quashed.

Oil production is like diamond production. It's rediculously cheap and a
massive conspiracy called OPEC exists to make sure it stays expensive,
in order to bleed as much money as possible out of consumers.

Last I checked raw sunlight is free - in fact in most homes we spend a lot
of money getting rid of what we call "waste heat" via air conditioning that
is generated by that sunlight falling on those homes. It is simply a matter
of
converting all that free energy into a more usable and storable form.
Once someone invents a photovoltiac solar cell that has an efficiency
on the order of 80% instead of the miserable 15-20% today, we already
have zinc-air battery technology available that could make use of that.

There's some promising research on 50% efficient solar cells here:

http://trnmag.com/Stories/2002/121102/Material_soaks_up_the_sun_121102.html



Ted

 

Oh crap! You're telling me that I'm thinking like George Carlin!
Seriously I don't listen to him. This is upsetting! 8^)

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

No - our politicians (and apparently those in Europe) would just tax it
more.

Remember that Beatles song "The Taxman" that I quoted a few weeks ago:
"...Take a walk and I'll tax your feet..."

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

They can go ahead and tax my feet. Just so long as I'm not working my life
away to pay for some Arab.

We need independence from foreign oil.

Don't be so pig-headed and admit that your boy bush is a mistake.

 

You do realize that this "oil" system was in place LONG before either Bush
and will be in place long after, don't you?

 

Unfortunately, yes.

I'd rather pay for some other method of getting around as long as no bush or
an Arab is getting rich off my need to travel to and from work etc. But
until that time, I will suffer along with the rest of you.