The exchange does not prevent people from dealing directly with the oil suppliers without going through the exchange. Many of the major industries do have exchanges, like those for coppoer and other metals.
Jeff
Those additives also keep the air clean.
Gee, do you think that is why it is a different thread?
In the visual hierarchy of my news reader, it shows as being in the same thread. Since Mister Bear erased any indication of who he was replying to, I see no proof it it being in a different thread. The fact that he changed the subject line really doesn't matter as much as where the message landed.
You and I will never be able to tell whether Exxon deals directly with suppliers, or buys through exchanges. We *do* know that Exxon and others use the speculators' excuses to jack up the price at the pump, though. In other words, they could be buying direct at $85 per barrel, but pointing to the nonsensical news and saying "But look - oil's at $93. That's what we're paying."
Back to other industries: The vast majority of products you buy are priced based purely on negotiation. If you claim to disagree, you are lying, or very badly informed.
Let's use an example: The cans and labels Del Monte buys. Please show me what exchange they're traded on.
Empty bottles purchased by Seagram: Show me the exchange.
Yellow legal pads produced for Staples: Show me the exchange.
Exxon doesn't claim they're paying a particular value. It's a market system. The market determines the price.
And the price that they pay is based on the market price. If green peppers are going for $0.50, the farmer is not going to get the grocery store or the restaurant to pay $2.00.
You keep claiming that the exchange system is responsible for the high price of gasoline. Prove it.
Until them, I am not wasting my electrons.
Jeff
What do you do for a living? We need to discuss this in a way directly related to YOUR business, or we will get nowhere.
That's correct, but there is no speculative gambling casino in between the farmer and the supermarket, except for a wholesaler, although that's not the case with the largest supermarkets which buy direct much of the time.
I'll give you examples of how the casino affects prices. But first, I need for you to show me the exchanges which f*ck with the price of cans, labels, empty bottles and legal pads.
Hillary has been like this since she was co-governor of Arkansas. She wanted mandatory government-run pre-school even back then. (Check her platform, it's still there.) Why? Indoctrination, of course, so little kiddies will grow up being 'politically correct'.
She has no use for the 'little people' except as they vote for her. She is an extreme elitist. How I explain her to my friends, is that she's basically Joe Stalin in drag. If you think Nixon had an 'Enemies List', just let Hillary take over. There will be many strange deaths just like Vince Foster's supposed 'suicide' and MacDougal's unexplained heart attack, and Ron Brown's crashing into a mountain in a plane that, for some reason, didn't have a black box.
A vote for Hillary is a vote for Bill. And a vote to repeal the Constitution.
Charles the Curmudgeon
I would say I use 32 gallons in my Yaris, a month...
Thats 16 bucks in savings for a month or two.. WOO HOO.. I am rich...
Honestly, I don't care about gas prices.. let them rise and fall with demand
What do you do for a living?
More subsidies. When you subsidize something, demand is artificially inflated leading to significant price increases, which in turn lead to more demands for even more subsidies.
Post-secondary education costs only began to outstrip wage and price averages once government programs ramped up significantly. The well-intentioned G.I. Bill started the trend - the University of Michigan, for example, went from 10,000 students before the war to 30,000 in 1948. Think tuition went up? Yep. So then people not covered by the GI Bill started whining about high costs, leading to more and more government spending, with fewer and fewer restrictions (i.e. more unqualified students going to college leading to more remedial classes), and the cycle continues today.
And what do universities and colleges do with all this money? Do most of them have huge profits and endowments? Certainly, some of them do (Harvard's endowment is about 10x its annual operating budget). Most universities and colleges don't have huge endowments. They spend lots of money on improving facilities, adding technology like wireless services, maintaining buildings, building new buildings, as well as direct education costs, like salaries for professors.
Please show that the costs are unreasonable given the level of services given to students.
Jeff
Does not matter. Oil is not a finite source. The more you let the market worry about it, the faster we will find alternatives and the lesser we will use our resources when we do not have to.
No, all they have to do to start a price-raising panic is have a refinery worker go take a Smoke Break, and drop his lit Ronson a bit too close to a cracking tower with some loose vapors floating around, and they make sure to have lovely footage of the "horrible refinery fire that will interrupt operations for a week" on the Six O'Clock News.
And I can almost GUARANTEE we'll get one, maybe two refinery fires that "interrupt gasoline production" in Southern California this spring or summer, you can almost set your watch by them.
And then they say "We can't bring in refined gasoline from other regions, because it won't meet our special emissions blends..." Even when the Feds say they'll suspend the rules for a month to allow it.
The Refiners play us for suckers, and we fall for it. Hook, Line, Sinker, fighting chair, and sometimes the entire stern of the boat.
"We don't have enough refining capacity to meet demand!" So BUILD SOME MORE CAPACITY, fools!! If you can make more refined products than the competition, you get to sell more. But true competition would depress prices slightly (even considering the higher volume means higher overall profits) and we can't have that...
-->--
We'll be sure to have problems at the aging Amoco refinery in Whiting Indiana, or the Citgo refinery in the Chicago area, too. Same purpose, to keep Chicago gas prices above the magical 3 dollar figure. They've been wanting it since Katrina. Now they've got it. But in getting it, they've destroyed the worth of the American dollar abroad. The having is never so pleasing a thing as the wanting.
Charles the Curmudgeon.
Build new sports arenas every few years. Overpay fatcat administrators. Build buildings that don't teach. Hire too many administrators. Admit too many students. Offer too many classes (not just the wasteful remedial ones).
Please show that the level of services given to students has not declined despite this massive inflow of cash.
So you admit that "college tuition costs outstrip just about everything in terms of cost/inflation", which was the point of the original post.
Game over. You lose.
You're weirder than me. I respect that!
They don't need to really set anything on fire. All they need to do is "release footage" created for them by whoever helped out in movies like "Die Hard". :-)
In another thread, you said "I served in Iraq. I was afraid of getting my ass shot off." Why are you also afraid to provide a simple piece of information that would add another level of understanding to this discussion? I can see being afraid of bullets & bombs, but not words.
If you say "I'm a mechanic", do you think that will reveal your work & home addresses, and where your kids go to school?
It's not very insightful to reveal your true address details over a non-secured medium such as commercial web sites or usenet.
Https sites are safe, but everywhere else one should always use false information. This includes your name, age, d.o.b., city, etc. For example, I always use January 1 of the year of my birth, rather than my real d.o.b.
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