GAS PRICES

Rip off time !

I'm heading out for MA. in the morning to pick up a MM horse drawn hay mower I won on e-bay back when gas was $2.16 a gal. here in Wisconsin. (That was in April.)It just hit $2.59 today. It was at $2.49 just 3 days ago!!!!

I was living in Los Angeles during the late 70's amid the artificial gas shortages that saw tankers dumping gas in the Mojave.. wow $0.70 and change a gallon and everybody was up in arms.

I waited for my gas on odd days - up at 3am to be in a gas line at 4am so I could get to work by 7am. Been there done that...

Now, I am back in Canada, have been for 25 years.. got used to the Government taking us off of the Gold Standard - letting the dollar seek its own market value against the US buck. Hey in 1977 I was getting $1.25 Canadian for every US dollar, now I am getting what -- $0.82 US...

Right now I am paying $1.07/litre Canadian for gas. There is 3.84 litres to a US gallon. That equates to oh lets see $4.1088 or $4.11/US gallon in Canadian funds or $3.37 roughly per gallon US.

Oh, and I am also on a pension.. very fixed and I still have 4 girls at home and 3 of them are in university. I have no health insurance so I have to pay for my prescriptions, glasses and dental just like y'all do stateside. The only thing I don't have to worry about is hospital bills. Thank God for that otherwise, after this past year I would be in major pooh....

I still get along. I get to play with my tractors, and still get to visit a lot of places. Granted I cannot afford to go to too many shows say 1,000 miles away, especially if I was to tow my tractors.. but we still get to enjoy all the stuff close to home.

I don't mean to rain on anyones parade, but you know - gas is cheaper today than it was 30 years ago. If you compare the ratio of what it took out of your paycheck to fill up the old bazoo back when, and what it costs now, it is quite a bit cheaper. It just seems more expensive cause the numbers are higher.

If I might make a suggestion.

Take it in stride. It is no big deal. Certainly nothing we as citizens can do. The only thing we can do is stay a little closer to home, visit with our tractor buddies near us, and hopefully, the big gas companies will find out that simple truth that the more you charge the less volume you get. The less volume, the less profit...

Pricies will drop.

Also, you got to wonder about these speculators --they are the ones that are driving the crude prices through the roof. Some fancy pants who has no spine, sees a hurricane and figures it will off production by so much... so he bids higher for crude - and like lemmings the rest follow. Suddenly, no hurricane... just a twit with a bad case of jitters. Same thing with the mid-east. There has not been a drop in output in many years, in fact there is almost a glut... prices should still be around $30.00US a barrel... but these fancy pants with no nerves are controlling the prices...

If they grew up a bit, got some backbone, we would all be better off.

Sorry for the soapbox, but sometimes I get a little antsy about this subject.

Everybody in the US is complaining about paying $2.50 gallon. Hey, it is still the cheapest fuel in the Industrialized world.

Europe is paying even more per litre than we in Canada are.

I just take everything one day at a time now.. and I find I get to enjoy my tractors and everything else a whole bunch more.

Keep smilin.. :-)

Sometimes I wonder if people forget the long gas lines of the seventies.

When we quit buying their fuel, it is amazing how fast that price drops.

Allan

Curious, I'm not a real farmer (just play one on TV). Have you guys seen any big jumps in the price of fertilizer or seed? They are both pretty energy-intensive manufacturing operations and I would expect that higher energy costs would be more of a $/
acre impact than the cost of fuel...

Spent a week at Lake Winnepasauke and didn't catch a thing. You could see big bass and trout 20' down just hanging out but they weren't interested. Went snorkeling and they would follow you around. If you turned over rocks they would eat the crayfish out of your hand but I'll be darned if we could get one on a hook. We had a good time anyway though - cabin 3 feet from the lake and lots of good food.

Had to come back to RI to catch this one.

I have some thought on this whole matter, just thinking what would happen if trucks were not allowed to cross more than one state or provincial border, we put a ban on all motor sports, tax all air travel out of business. I'm thinking we must use water and rail transportation a whole lot more. A gallon of fuel hauls a lot more product by rail and water. But then one has to consider what all this would do to the economy. Would be a lot of folks without income all of a sudden. Then remember it was the greed of the railroads that put those trucks on the road in the first place. If we imposed the one boundary crossing for trucks, just think the retail industry would actually have to hire smart people in their purchasing depts.

I was talking with a trucker the other night in Leamington ON, He was loading with tomatoes for British Columbia. Asked him what his last load was. His reply, "BC tomatoes to Toronto." This is so typical, seems like a product is not usable unless it's trucked 1,000 miles. Right now, Mexican broccoli is actually less money in Chicago, Detroit or Toronto than local broccoli. I guess North Americans have priced themselves out of existance.

I think we best wake up and smell the roses. Yes we have old farts that smoked all their lives running around with these inhalers so they can breath. They are told it is their bad habit. What about the kids under 12 never smoked in their lives. School teachers will tell you a large percentage kids have the inhalers. When it comes to sucking in oxygen, man is no match for a 500 hp internal combustion engine.

What do you think about the statement that there have been people who have developed alternative fuel sources or much more efficient ways to use current energy, but as soon as the big oil companies get wind of it, they buy all the rights to the guy"s idea for a gazillion dollars and then destroy all trace of the idea just so they can keep selling lots of oil? It just sounds like another conspiracy theory to me, but maybe I"m just naive.
Paul

They have sure never put it on the market. I learned to drive and got my first drivers licence with my dad's 57 Chevy sedan, 25 mpg. Today almost 50 years later I drive a Buick Lesabre, not a whole lot of difference in size and still get 25 mpg. Gee progress has been great. The Chevy seated 6 adults quite comfortably, the Buick doesn't. You can talk with countless people who have experienced much the same on fuel milage.

I once spoke with a rail locomotive operator, asked him about photos you see of trains coming from western Canada with 5 locomotives up front. I said you never see that in the east. His responce,"you can take 3 diesels off at Thunder Bay, as going from there to Halifax, at any given time half the train is on down grade. In fact there are portion of that run a VW beetle would pull the train, just wouldn't have the power to operate the compressor for braking." That same freight being hauled on trucks can not take advantage of the rolling hills.

The big oil companies have kept any carburetor
off the market that would give good mileage by buying up the rights. Trains will be used to haul freight extensively if the price of oil continue's to rise and becomes scarce. Hal

1. Our medical technology is one of our crowning acceivements, it is also our downfalls
example the ability to treat cancer the way they do now. 30 years ago cancer was fatal, now not so much so. On that same note though, this is also weakening our gene pool. Example If you drink about 6 beers and decide to go outside and start trimming a tree with a chainsaw, you are fully entitled to be the benefactor of your stupidity. If you cut your arm off you deserve to lose it, not have it reattached. I don't mean to be offense or anything, but it serves as a walking lesson to everybody else out there. IE a public hanging once in awhile is not a bad thing. We as a society are lossing our common sense and it's scarey sometimes.