coming crisis: July 2006 Archives

Big jump in gas prices in my neighborhood: I snapped the image on the left on Thursday morning.

When I got home less than twelve hours later, the price had jumped again.

And I thought these prices were obscene last summer...

I'm so sick of hearing the argument that, Oh, we shouldn't complain, look what they're paying Europe for gas! Yeah, they pay more for gas in Europe than we do in the United States... but the bulk of what they pay -- as much as 75 percent -- is taxes that go back into maintaining the infrastructure that drivers use. In the U.S., the prices we're paying at the pump are only about 12.5 percent taxes, which means that all the extra dough we've all been pouring into our cars is going to record profits for the oil companies.

How long can this go on before something snaps?

(Technorati tags: gas prices, record oil profits)

It’s just been one of those days -- one of those weeks -- in which it seems the world is going to hell. It’s 92 degrees at 9:53pm in New York City, in the greenest part of the Bronx where it’s always at least 5 degrees cooler than it is in Manhattan. I’ve been kept superbusy -- kept from the important work of blogging, that is -- by a freelance gig at a fashion magazine where the biggest worry is whether the photos of the $20,000 diamond wedding rings are big enough. But at least I was in out of the heat all day -- my apartment, where I usually work, is not air-conditioned; who can afford it, when my Con Ed bill is running 100 bucks a month without an AC, or a hair dryer, or a washing machine, or any major appliance apart from a fridge that is notorious for sucking up power? But then again, Con Ed (that’s the local power utility) was calling for major corps around Manhattan to reduce their power usage this afternoon in an attempt to avoid having to go to rolling blackouts in the extraordinary heat, which meant that the major-corporate-owned mag I was working at turned off some of the elevators and most of the lights and lowered the AC. Which was fine, actually, cuz it’s always too bright and way too cold there.

I mentioned a while back how I was gonna start keeping an eye on the price of gas at my corner BP station, just for shits and giggles. And it just took a jump, after a dip so brief that I didn’t even get a chance to take a picture of the price board. (The cheap gas was at $3.13 for about 12 hours before it popped back up to these prices here.)

Anyway, none of it matters because a giant asteroid is gonna kill us all tonight. Or maybe not. But you can already hear the refrain from Our Glorious Leaders echoing back through time from 2026 or whenever, who will say things like, “No one could have predicted that a big rock would strike the Earth.” And then they’ll declare a Global War on Asteroids, and some people will begin to declare that “rock” music is unpatriotic, and they’ll change the name to “freedom to breath air that isn’t choked with a hundred trillion tons of pulverized cities and mountain ranges” music, and politicians will start declaring that they were for hunting down asteroids before they were against it, and...

(Technorati tags: gas prices, killer asteroids)