Re: 600 mile range Federal law needed

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:

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:

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.

When the choices are the likes of Dean or Kerry or Algore, believe me - I'll take Bush. You libs want to get one of your own in office, then quit parading around people like Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, and George Soros. Your choice. I'm just the messenger. Reality is a bitch.

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

Didn't the Nash 600 come out in the early '40's claiming 30mpg on a 20 gallon gas tank?

He has a great monolog about religion where he says he's decided to cut all the crap and just worship the sun.

Ted

There's been a lot of those in automotive history. Secret: make the car really really light with a really really small underpowered engine. It works really well until you decide to go up a hill, drive fast on the interstate, or another bigger car runs into you.

Ted