[Biofuel] YOUR EFFORT CAN BRING THE OIL PRICE DOWN
PLEASE DO YOUR EFFORT AND PASS ON THE MESSAGE TO LOWER THE PRICE OF OIL Nice Logic - It May Work !! THINK ABOUT IT…… A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the Kirana store he pays Rs. 12 a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to Rs. 16. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are Rs. 22 a dozen. When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly . This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on. As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of eggs. Then week before Diwali the price of eggs shot up to Rs. 40 a dozen. Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, Cakes and baking for the holiday. The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking, baking, etc. happen. This pattern continues until the price of eggs is Rs. 60 a dozen. The man says, There must be something we can do about the price of eggs. He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop buying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed eggs. Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate 2 eggs a day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day. The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in his cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week. The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the huge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would not need any for at least two weeks. At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs. To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy the eggs at a lower price. The distributor said, I don't have the room for the %$^*% eggs even if they were free. The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again. The grocery store owner said, I don't have room for more eggs. The customers are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time. Now if you were to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would start buying by the dozen again. The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the egg farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those chickens just kept on laying. Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price of their eggs. But only a few paisa. The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, when the price of eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by the dozen. Slowly the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had to slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers. The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn't buy at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, they had full warehouses and wouldn't need eggs for quite a while. And those chickens kept on laying. Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing away eggs they couldn't sell. The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to where the stores could afford to sell them at the lower price. And the customers starting buying by the dozen again. Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry. What if everyone only bought Rs 200.00 worth of Petrol each time they pulled to the pump? The dealer's tanks would stay semi full all the time. The dealers wouldn't have room for the gas coming from the huge tanks. The tank farms wouldn't have room for the petrol coming from the refining plants. And the refining plants wouldn't have room for the oil being off loaded from the huge tankers coming from the oil fiends. Just Rs 200.00 each time you buy gas. Don't fill up the tank of your car. You may have to stop for gas twice a week, but the price should come down. Think about it. Also, don't buy anything else at the fuel station; don't give them any more of your hard earned
Re: [Biofuel] YOUR EFFORT CAN BRING THE OIL PRICE DOWN
Only it won't bring the price down. From previous: Even if corn is going to make ethanol, so? So the world has increased its demand for oil, and that means that oil costs more, :-) You fell for it eh? So did you. Please read this, especially Michael W. Masters' testimony: http://www.mail-archive.com/sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg72935.html Re: [Biofuel] The food emergency and food myths Tue, 01 Jul 2008 And then explain how your solution could change anything. Best Keith PLEASE DO YOUR EFFORT AND PASS ON THE MESSAGE TO LOWER THE PRICE OF OIL Nice Logic - It May Work !! THINK ABOUT IT A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the Kirana store he pays Rs. 12 a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to Rs. 16. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are Rs. 22 a dozen. When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly . This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on. As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of eggs. Then week before Diwali the price of eggs shot up to Rs. 40 a dozen. Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, Cakes and baking for the holiday. The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking, baking, etc. happen. This pattern continues until the price of eggs is Rs. 60 a dozen. The man says, There must be something we can do about the price of eggs. He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop buying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed eggs. Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate 2 eggs a day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day. The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in his cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week. The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the huge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would not need any for at least two weeks. At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs. To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy the eggs at a lower price. The distributor said, I don't have the room for the %$^*% eggs even if they were free. The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again. The grocery store owner said, I don't have room for more eggs. The customers are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time. Now if you were to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would start buying by the dozen again. The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the egg farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those chickens just kept on laying. Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price of their eggs. But only a few paisa. The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, when the price of eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by the dozen. Slowly the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had to slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers. The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn't buy at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, they had full warehouses and wouldn't need eggs for quite a while. And those chickens kept on laying. Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing away eggs they couldn't sell. The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to where the stores could afford to sell them at the lower price. And the customers starting buying by the dozen again. Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry. What if everyone only bought Rs 200.00 worth of Petrol each time they pulled to the pump? The dealer's tanks would stay semi full all the time. The dealers wouldn't have room for the gas coming from the
Re: [Biofuel] YOUR EFFORT CAN BRING THE OIL PRICE DOWN
If I follow the logic, you are not reducing the actual consumption of eggs, only adjusting the timing slightly. This will be accommodated by slight adjustments in the transport chain, and not by the producers. Like today's gasoline junkies, you want to keep getting your fix, just make a token gesture to make it OK. Instead, what if your egg buyers all agreed to consume only one egg a day? Then production would be 2 times the demand. That might make a difference, but you are up against large, concentrated owners of the production with deep pockets, who will surely try to outlast you. If the price of eggs is five times what it was (60 Rs vs. 12 in your example), they can afford to throw away half their production, and still be making more than they were originally. If they are motivated by profits, this is what they will do. This is why free markets need to prevent monopolies and oligopolies. The case with oil is actually worse, because is not perishable in the sense that eggs are, and storage is free (leave it in the ground and slow the pumping). Only if we have enough small players in the supply side and the demand side do the conventional market rules apply. This is not Adam Smith's world. As for not buying products at the store associated with the fuel station, most people will pay for convenience, and these stores are designed to prey on human behaviour such as low-priced, high-margin impulse purchase items. It will be a real challenge to overcome that formula. The best option for most people is to get off the oil habit so that the price becomes irrelevant to them in direct purchasing. Instead of eggs, perhaps you could buy cheese. Or buy a couple of hens (yes, it's a bit more complex than that) and produce your own eggs, maybe enough to provide for a neighbour. For real world fuel savings (gasoline specifically), my Web page: http://www.econogics.com/en/savefuel.htm Darryl Sivaramakrishnan Ananthakrishnan wrote: PLEASE DO YOUR EFFORT AND PASS ON THE MESSAGE TO LOWER THE PRICE OF OIL Nice Logic - It May Work !! THINK ABOUT IT…… A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the Kirana store he pays Rs. 12 a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to Rs. 16. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are Rs. 22 a dozen. When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly . This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on. As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of eggs. Then week before Diwali the price of eggs shot up to Rs. 40 a dozen. Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, Cakes and baking for the holiday. The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the price of eggs goes up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other times when family cooking, baking, etc. happen. This pattern continues until the price of eggs is Rs. 60 a dozen. The man says, There must be something we can do about the price of eggs. He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop buying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed eggs. Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate 2 eggs a day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day. The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs in his cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week. The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the huge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would not need any for at least two weeks. At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs. To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buy the eggs at a lower price. The distributor said, I don't have the room for the %$^*% eggs even if they were free. The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again. The grocery store owner said, I
[Biofuel] [corp-focus] Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil
From: robert weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [corp-focus] Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:45:54 -0400 Links and forum to comment on this and other columns at: http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/editorsblog Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil By Robert Weissman July 11, 2008 Last month witnessed the extraordinary contrast of two perspectives on crime, punishment and ExxonMobil. Just two days after leading climate change scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Congress that he believed ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel company CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature for their role in delaying a serious global response to climate change, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that a $2.5 billion punitive judgment against Exxon for the Valdez oil spill disaster denied the company the sense of fairness to which it is entitled. Each of these proclamations is extremely significant in its own right. The Supreme Court's ruling has the more obvious direct importance. Operating in the framework of maritime law, where it is free to establish its own rules in the absence of Congressional guidance, the Court held in a 5-3 ruling that punitive damage awards should not exceed compensatory damages. In other words, the punitive fine imposed by a civil jury should not be greater than the harm the jury found a defendant caused to a plaintiff by its wrongful act. As a matter of law, this was a remarkable ruling -- a hyper-activist, policy-driven, non-originalist action by a faction of the Court that claims to defer to legislative determinations or seek its legitimacy in the Constitution, law or strongly rooted history. And the policy choices made by the Court are not only corporate-friendly and harmful to the victims of corporate wrongdoing and the environment, they are remarkably poorly argued. The real premise of the Court's decision, written by Justice Souter, is that American punitive damages have been the target of audible criticism in recent decades, but it is forced to acknowledge in the same sentence that these criticisms are ill founded. There is no problem of runaway awards, the Court concedes; and punitive damage awards are rising in neither frequency nor amount. Thus the Court is forced to rely on a purported problem of unpredictability in punitive damage awards, even as it acknowledges that appellate courts routinely overturn or limit outlier awards. (Indeed, the original Exxon punitive verdict had been $5 billion.) Concluding that more predictability is needed, the Court determines that some formula to restrict punitives is appropriate. It settles on the idea of a ratio to compensatory damages. Many states have adopted such ratios, so they seem like a good idea, the Court concludes. A plurality of states have a ratio of 3:1, but having relied on the state experience as the rationale for adopting a federal maritime rule, the Court then declares that the state rules are too different to set the right ratio. Instead, the Court says it bases its assessment of a reasonable ratio on juries' actual awards -- the very juries it is trying to constrain. The median punitive damage award is less than the compensatory award, so the Court settles on a 1:1 ratio. The Court states, we would expect that awards at the median or lower would roughly express jurors' sense of reasonable penalties in cases with no earmarks of exceptional blameworthiness within the punishable spectrum. You can read that a few times. It still won't make sense. In a very concise dissent, Justice Stevens takes apart the majority argument. In short, he writes, if Congress has not acted, and there are no constitutional issues (none were involved in this case), then appellate courts should review punitive awards and overturn them only if they constitute an abuse of discretion. If the only problem is a few outlier awards, then appellate review easily solves the problem. On an abuse-of-discretion standard, I am persuaded that a reviewing court should not invalidate this award, Justice Stevens wrote. In light of Exxon's decision to permit a lapsed alcoholic to command a supertanker carrying tens of millions of gallons of crude oil through the treacherous waters of Prince William Sound, thereby endangering all of the individuals who depended upon the sound for their livelihoods, the jury could reasonably have given expression to its 'moral condemnation' of Exxon's conduct in the form of this award. Left unstated, but most important for the purpose of deterring bad corporate behavior, is that the very unpredictability disdained by the Court's majority is one of the core benefits of punitive damages. Corporations are not people, and the Court's rhetoric about preserving a sense of fairness in dealing with one another is inapposite as regards corporations' wrongful acts against real people. The point that corporations are not people is not just
Re: [Biofuel] YOUR EFFORT CAN BRING THE OIL PRICE DOWN
Hi Darryl, Sivaramakrishnan The logic assumes, once yet again, that it has something to do with supply and demand - soaring prices obviously mean supply isn't keeping up with demand. Nope - there's plenty of oil, there's no shortage, and demand is falling, yet the price keeps going up. As you say Darryl, this is not Adam Smith's world. Actually it is. Adam Smith didn't like corporations, nor governments. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. (The Wealth of Nations) How does the fashionable logic - that there's a shortage of oil - square with what OPEC keeps saying? It's very difficult now to find a market. If you tell me there is someone to whom we haven't sold oil and who needs it, I'd see, but right now I put my oil on the market and I don't find buyers, [OPEC President Chakib] Khelil, who is also Algeria's energy minister said. -- OPEC chief sees oil at $150-170 in coming months, Reuters, Thu Jun 26, 2008 http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService_3_MOLT/idUSPAB00415020080626?sp=true Hundreds of people have said it by now, including us here, four months ago already: THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF OIL. Think about it. Yes, please do!!! Before we have any more talk of what to do about the oil shortage. Again: http://www.mail-archive.com/sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg72935.html Re: [Biofuel] The food emergency and food myths Tue, 01 Jul 2008 Plenty more, if you look. The best option for most people is to get off the oil habit so that the price becomes irrelevant to them in direct purchasing. Hear hear Darryl. Best Keith If I follow the logic, you are not reducing the actual consumption of eggs, only adjusting the timing slightly. This will be accommodated by slight adjustments in the transport chain, and not by the producers. Like today's gasoline junkies, you want to keep getting your fix, just make a token gesture to make it OK. Instead, what if your egg buyers all agreed to consume only one egg a day? Then production would be 2 times the demand. That might make a difference, but you are up against large, concentrated owners of the production with deep pockets, who will surely try to outlast you. If the price of eggs is five times what it was (60 Rs vs. 12 in your example), they can afford to throw away half their production, and still be making more than they were originally. If they are motivated by profits, this is what they will do. This is why free markets need to prevent monopolies and oligopolies. The case with oil is actually worse, because is not perishable in the sense that eggs are, and storage is free (leave it in the ground and slow the pumping). Only if we have enough small players in the supply side and the demand side do the conventional market rules apply. This is not Adam Smith's world. As for not buying products at the store associated with the fuel station, most people will pay for convenience, and these stores are designed to prey on human behaviour such as low-priced, high-margin impulse purchase items. It will be a real challenge to overcome that formula. The best option for most people is to get off the oil habit so that the price becomes irrelevant to them in direct purchasing. Instead of eggs, perhaps you could buy cheese. Or buy a couple of hens (yes, it's a bit more complex than that) and produce your own eggs, maybe enough to provide for a neighbour. For real world fuel savings (gasoline specifically), my Web page: http://www.econogics.com/en/savefuel.htm Darryl Sivaramakrishnan Ananthakrishnan wrote: PLEASE DO YOUR EFFORT AND PASS ON THE MESSAGE TO LOWER THE PRICE OF OIL Nice Logic - It May Work !! THINK ABOUT IT A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the Kirana store he pays Rs. 12 a dozen. Since a dozen eggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to Rs. 16. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are Rs. 22 a dozen. When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly . This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit.
Re: [Biofuel] YOUR EFFORT CAN BRING THE OIL PRICE DOWN
Keith Addison wrote: The best option for most people is to get off the oil habit so that the price becomes irrelevant to them in direct purchasing. Hear hear Darryl. Seventeen mile commute by bike and bus, five days a week for the past four weeks. I'm working on it! -Kurt ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Texas law requires computer repairmen to be licensed private investigators
Big Brother is expanding his empire. This fits right in with US Custom's search of your laptop's hard drive as you enter the U$A. Our privacy rights are steadily being eroded. Some mail programs keep a copy of what you send. Be sure to disable that feature. New Texas law requires computer repairmen to be licensed private investigators. In future, technicians may be required to examine your hard disk and report to the government - to find terrorists, of course. CW33 Posted 2008 July 5 (Cached) -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20080711/3ef257ea/attachment.html ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
