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Strategies & Market Trends : Ask Vendit Off-Topic Questions -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (7884)	4/17/2005 1:24:33 PM
From: Walkingshadow	Respond to of 8752

<<you are very subjective in your remarks.>> Naturally. They are my views. "Objective remarks" is a contradiction in terms. <<present oil refineries cannot expand.>> A moot point. There's no motivation to expand. Re oil refinery profits: I agree. I never suggested they were profitable. I said there was and will be zero incentive to increase refining capacity. It makes no economic sense. <<If any truth to price fixing federal gov. would have come up with findings.>> Great idea. Obviously they are sharp as a tack, since they did such a great job in California with the multibillion dollar windfall that taxpayers got left holding the bag on with the electric "power shortage." Or how about the S&L scandal that my grandchildren will be footing the bill for? These are only specific cases of a rather general conflict of interest: asking a government that was put into power by large interests to seriously police and counter the power of those same interests (as opposed to token handwaving efforts) is like asking the wolves to take care of your sheep for you. The reason de eitre of every government that has ever existed on this planet including ours is to further the interests of property owners and those controlling the production of goods and services. The founding fathers would have been horrified at the thought of non-property owners actually voting, but their fears would have been ungrounded: the "power" of the voting masses has been effectively neutralized, while the perception of that selfsame power has been carefully preserved. A neat trick that evidently never occurred to someone as profoundly brilliant as Thomas Jefferson. But then again, Jefferson was a strongly principled and imminently practical man (say what you will about his slaves). <<show me an oil company that will want to replace all the underground tanks at service stations, facilities etc to deliver hydrogen. I wonder where the money will come from for the capital investments required. I wonder what the payout will be to distribute it. >> I agree, and that's one reason why we have seen 30 years of "demonstration" this and that kind of vehicles (solar powered, fuel cell powered, etc), but nothing deployed on any scale to seriously rival internal combustion engines. And now that Alaska is opening up, we'll be looking at another 30 years of "demonstration" alternative energy this and that that, sadly, only high school physics teachers and their students take seriously enough to actually put time, effort, and money into. There is no incentive. If anything, there is strong motivation to the contrary. and now, we are compounding the problem by opening up Alaskan fields, which will be like throwing gasoline on that fire to try to put it out. My point is that sufficient incentive doesn't exist and must be created, but nobody seems to have the ability or desire or both to do so. Except a physics teacher at Central High. Pathetic and sad. T