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OK, I'll try to be more obvious with the abo humour on racism. I'm a very dangerous man this week. I saw an old Billy Jack film this past weekend! After the film I got to wondering about the "halfbreed" hero of my teenage years, a hero from another age with different sensibilities. I was surprised to find the site below and that good old Billy was fix'in to come out of retirement to open another can of whop ass for the Republicans. http://www.billyjack.com/ The site seems to be up intermittently. It worked on Sunday, but, can't be found this AM. Keep trying at other times if your browser can't find the site at the first try. It must be running on "Indian time"! If it never works again or you don't want to bother trying again, the highlight is Tom Laughlin is mightily displeased with the Republican regime as well as its Democratic opposition and the general decay of "American" democracy. After an over thirty year hiatus a new Billy Jack movie will be released some time this year containing these themes. Supposedly some "Forest Gump" style interaction with presidential footage featuring George B. Go Billy Go! God its great to cheer for old heroes making a comeback. I get pumped about Billy Jack the same way Italians from Philly get pumped by Rocky Balboa!

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha......... Good... Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha.... Good one CBC! The oregano, hemp and kumbaya themes are hilarous! They're making of fun of both the left and right here in case you didn't catch it. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..................... Stop stop, my sides here. You people here at MLW need to develop a sense of humour and stop taking yourselves so seriously Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..........................

I'm fairly certain gasoline retail is optimized for profit using a method called "linear programming". I won't get into the details of the methodology here other than to briefly describe how it works in this application. People will continue to buy gasoline at a set volume per week so long as the price stays within a certain range. Lower the price below this range and gasoline purchases will rise, however the profit margin is decreased. Raise the price above the range and purchases drop, but, profit margins are higher. Linear programming is used to determine the price that optimizes profit. That is, find the price that offers the best compromise between profit margin and purchase volume to maximize profits. Many factors other than price and purchase are used in linear programming. The fact that such methodology is being used is betrayed by the way gasoline prices rise at holidays and drop when the holiday is over under the influence of these factors. People want to travel or drive more on holidays than they do at other times. Propensity to consume is a factor often used in marketing models employing linear programming. Most other industries employ linear programming or other similiar optimization methods in marketing and profit and optimization. Thos familiar with the methods would not be surprised at all if gasoline marketing used them. The main difference between gasoline retailing and other retailers is a greed obsessed daily adjustment of pricing instead of a more conentional weekly, monthly or annual adjustment of price. The application of optimization methods are supposedly good for an economy. I can buy this most of the time. However when it comes to vital services, utilities and telecommunications are a good examples, its often better for the economy and society as a whole if government interferes to contol prices and stabilize the market. We find another examples of required government or centralized control of a free market in the setting of interest rates for borrowing and lending. To a certain extent free for all marketing is good for an economy. However if the free for all gets out of control in a certain market it can have disastrous consequences for an economy and a society. The rise of a monopoly condition is often bad for a competitive free market economy. Again government has to step in and interfere with the "freedoms" of a free market. This is why deregulation has occurred recently in some markets like telecommunications. Despite all appearances to the contrary deregulation was government control (well 'interference in' if you prefer) of a market. Government limiting the profits in retailing of gasoline would likely also be a beneficial excercise in market influence since it has also become a "vital service". The gas companies wouldn't skip a beat. They'd just include the price controls in their optimization model and continue on marketing gasoline. The general public would see reduced prices at the pump and reduced inflation in the economy overall. You can likely Google "linear progamming" optimization to get more detailed background on such methods.

heh heh! snicker snicker! I like it when I have to play with you all here. I can see why some of you have racked up high scores here. Its stupid easy to just cut and paste from another post and add one liner at the end. Don't think I don't have considerable experience at these forums and don't know how people use the formats and mechanisms of these places to unfairly influence content! Some of you should count yourselves lucky I don't have more time to play. If I did you'd have to work considerably harder, spend a good deal more time, at your efforts to dominate this forum.

Fair enough! What you say is apparently true on the surface, but, I largely respond in kind to the what I have experienced for an entire lifetime of decades in this society and what I detect veiled behind careful language here. There is also a good deal of humour and satire in this holding up of the mirror. I'm a racist in the same way Andrew Dice Clay was sexist. Perhaps I am too subtle for mainstream mentality to grasp these nuances. I offer another example satirizing a classic "defence" to your accusation. Hell no! I'm not racist! Some of my best friends are non-aboriginals. Those who know me in real life, both abo and non-abo would be rolling around on the floor at the above. Taking umbrage at such satire indicates a lack of capacity to grasp the real nature of racism and division. To varying degrees we all wear masks, play roles, at these forums. I'm OK with playing the bad guy, making myself the target, to draw others out on this issue of racism (especially under an alias or avatar). Its a very useful and productive role if you can stand the heat. You should take more care in interpreting the comments of those who operate outside your own cultural context. Returning to the context of the thread, yeah, the political parties are all the same with very few real differences in ideaology or culture. Witness the recent "sweetheart" arrangement between Dion and May. The Tories think changing a few light bulbs is an effective address of greenhouse gas emissions while Jack Layton thinks everyone installing a 15 to 20 thousand dollar solar power system on their roof is is a feasible solution. To the last person, every politician in every political party at every level of government, despite it being a significant social and economic issue, has carefully avoided raising poverty and disparity in Canada as an election issue for the past 30 years of so. Why? Because their limited feudal mentality cannot even conceive of a mechanism or method to address the issue! Any real solutions would be far too disruptive to the way this shabby copy of feudal European society operates!

I don't believe much E May says or support her party despite my own lefty environmental leanings. All the white middle class political parties are the same pile of self-interested poo! They all operate from the same severely limited conceptual and cultural mentality. They all have the same colonial vision of economic development for the country, just keep ramping up the mining and export cheap unfinished or no value added raw materials at firesale prices. None of them have any real vision of economic, social and cultural development for Canada beyond that of the classic colonial governor. They all argue about and promote themselves with minor differences on how to keep raping the environment, to keep on keep'in on as we always have. They're all looking desperately and wishing like naive children for fairy tale technological fixes for environmental problems with none of them recognizing the problems are really cultural and not technological. The biggest problem with modern Canadian democracy is the absolute worst people to have as leaders are the people who want the role. The more they want it the worse a leader they are because its all self interest and ego. We're all familiar with the highly unlikeable coworker who wants desperately to be boss. Many of us have the further unpleasant experience of actually having the moron become the boss. I delight to this day at the fall of Paul Martin and his right wing faction in the Liberal party. Blindly rank personal ambition in leadership is never ever good for a country. And yeah, Jack Layton is just as full of himself as the rest! I don't know if I said this before here? The surest mark of the true peasant is a burning desire to be monarch! The surest mark of the true monarch is a burning desire to be peasant!

Interesting debate. Its also a healthy one for this era. Being aboriginal you're all immigrants to me! Most everyone who's migrated here in the past 500 years was a big loser in the old country who showed up on our shores with dollar signs shining in their eyes. Anybody who had a good life, was doing well in the old country, stayed there. There's nothing remarkably different in the motivations and expectations of modern immigrants. There's still a loser immigrant's fantasy of a triumphant return home as a succesful wealthy person inherent in many, even after generations here. You can find a recent example of this generations old dream of returning home wealthy in a CIBC commercial. You've likely all seen it. It ends with the line "Tuscany or Provence?" I'm fairly certain this "dream" of plush retirement outside the country in some fabled old European capital is still a common aspiration among white Canadians. CIBC wouldn't play into it if it weren't populist. Whats up with everyone suddenly being Celtic when River Dance is in town or suddenly Greek when "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was playing? Or how about during the World Cup of Soccer when all these Canadians are cheering for and identifying with "their" team, Irish, Italian, Jammaican, whatever. Real Canadians would cheer for and identify with the Canadian team! There's more than a little tongue in cheek in the above, so don't get your panties in a bunch. Those white Canadians who cheer for Canadian teams and plan to stay here for the rest of the lives and deal with the problems along with the rest of us can totally ignore the above. Its not aimed at them. Just an additional thought here. What is the Canadian cultural identity? It seems every time we want to showcase uniqely Canadian culture to visiting dignitaries a troup of pow wow dancers is hauled off the nearest reserve and made to dance for their supper! After the guests go home, its back to the reserve, exclusion and poverty for the dancers. In many ways Canada is messed up place with no real cultural identity of its own. Little wonder the immigrants find nothing substantial to latch onto in identifying themsevles as Canadians!

Good for for you Kookum Melanie having and raising all those children so conscientiously! The booze thing is funny in our society. Because I'm aboriginal a lot of people assume and I'm an ex-alcoholic because I don't drink and generally take a dim view of it. They assume I can't drink or I'll fall off the wagon. It didn't happen like that. I've never been in rehab or AA. In my teen years I drank as much booze as any other teen may have and quite a lot more than some. Around 20 I started connecting the after effects to the act. Hangovers just lasted too long and I was too drag ass and depressed after a good party. I started cutting back consciously. Over about ten years the desire to feel better in the days after a party caused me to cut back more and more until eventually about age 30 I stopped consuming alchohol altogether. But, I still get a craving for beer every once in awhile, not the buzz, but, the taste of it, like you would for chocolate. (I'm not a drinker, but, even I know the taste of non or low alcohol beer sucks.) In the paste three of four years I've made the mistake of drinking a whole beer out of this craving a few times. It really does impair you for about week to week and half afterward. If its bad for fetuses in your womb at any level of consumption its also likely bad for you! You really should care for yourself as well as you did your children. Nowadays I struggle to maintain what little tolerance I have left for coffee. I LOVE the taste of coffee, but, the caffeine really messes me up if I get too much of it, especially later in the day. Coke and Pepsi are also very bad this way. The best I can manage is about a cup or cup and half very early in the day. And again like beer, decaf sucks. I have other friends about my age who were also hard partiers in the 1970s and also tried all manner of psychoactive compounds as was par for that era. Many of them have also quit alcohol and/or caffeine. Maybe you have to get some experience with a wide range of psychoactive compounds to acquire the sensitivity needed to notice the more subtle side effects. I get a shiver of revulsion and nausea when I think about some of the "trips" I took earlier in life. I often think were I to imbibe either booze or coffee in the quantities I used to I'd end up in the hospital for sure! Uugghh! I can't believe I used to poison myself the way I did! Oh, by the way, I've noticed lately many of the hot spicy foods have subtle side effects that resemble amphetamines or cocaine. Users get a little rush of pleasure, erectile dysfunction (or a slightly less noticeable reduction of stamina in this area) and a relaxing of the involuntary muscles. Have you ever eaten a bowl of chili and had to make visit to the bathroom shortly after for a number two. A lot of people think this a reaction of their guts to the irritation of the spice. I don't think so any more. Ask a coke or crack head or speed freak about the "pukies" or the "shitties". Do you know someone who seems "addicted" to the hot spice rush almost to the point of masochism? Even though it'll burn your mouth just as bad or worse black pepper seems to not be favoured the same way for some reason. I mostly like the smell of black pepper on food. Coffee also has all these side effects in more a noticeable way. I do drink a lot of caffeinated tea though, but, again for some reason I haven't noticed a lot of these side effects from tea. A friend of mine claims its really the oils and associated alkaloids in non-decaffeinated coffee responsible for the unpleasant side effects. He quit drinking coffee (but also pounds tea) because it made his finger joints ache.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.... Funny thread. Life would have no meaning without cheese! We are the garbage guts of the biosphere. We eat a lot of things other animals don't and do quite nicely at it. This is one of the main reasons why we're such a successful widely spread species. We eat things that are really pest repellents for other species like hot peppers and mint, and LIKE EM! Yeah I'm really cheesed about the price of cheese too! Squeak, squeak! I don't drink alcohol though. Its a fuel and not a drug or beverage. You'd be surprised how a single beer can cloud your head for days after you've gone a decade or so without drinking any alcohol. People who use alcohol regularly never have their minds clear up enough to notice this side effect of stupidity. Go ahead quit for five years and find out. I dare you! The only use I find worthwhile for ethanol is to let it turn into vineagar for cooking. And as for cell phones I don't like the idea of an EM radiation source capable of penetrating cement and brick walls that close to my brain! Were it shorter wavelength it would be ionizing radiation like that found in your microwave oven.

I forgot the add on the topic if hybrid cars, there's a rule about machines that goes something like this. The required maintenance and repair for a machine is proportional to the square of its complexity. A lot of new hybrid car owners will re-learn this rather nasty rule about machines in a few short years in increased repair and maintenance costs that will likely offset the savings in money spent on gasoline. Hybrid cars will be pipeline and landfill fodder a lot sooner than traditional automobiles and they'll be more toxic landfill as well! Oh hell, somebody pass me a can of Lysol so I can ignore how stupid the rest of the junkies are!

Well actually no! My standard of living is not dependent on automobiles and trucks. That just another myth the corporate industrial interests has sold you. I'm aboriginal and old enough to remember a different way of life on the small family farm that didn't depend on the transportation industry. We grew grains only to feed livestock which we ate, chickens, pigs and cows with milk, eggs and butter made right on the farm. We grew massive gardens with water pumped by hand from a well. The surplus was used to feed horses which were used for the limited transportation needs. All of Saskatchewan lived like this only a few short decades ago. It was a higher standard of living than many in the inner city now have with a quality of nutrition and healthy level of exercise you'd be hard pressed to find in any urban settings now. and most importantly of all it was CLEAN! There was not an industrial chemical or fossil fuel to be found on the old style farms. Ask yourself, if biofuels are so great, why do they need to forced on consumers with legislated ratios of ethanol in gasoline and massive subsidies to the industry? Its all still the oil companies lobbyists having their way with policy makers in a "disguise" as environmental industrialists. Ethanol increases the amount of gasoline than can be made from barrel crude and it takes nearly as many joules of natural gas to distill a given amount of joules into ethanol. More joules of natural gas are burned to make a given amount of joules in ethanol if you have a less than perfect heat recovery system at the distillery. Like I said, drunks living in denial and looking to switch to far more toxic Lysol and aftershave because the booze is running out! By the way, I'm not a tree hug'in arts major. I do have a five year hard sciences degree in environmental systems engineering. As well I've worked at a refinery and in the engineering end of the fossil fuel industry. I've been studying all these things with this background for about a decade and half now. There's only one remarkably simple system which seems viable in meeting our energy needs and curbing the production of greenhouse gases, the burning of agricultural waste. It would require setting up a lot of small regional power plants similiar to the ones we now use to make electricity from coal. All agricultural waste in the region, stubble (which gets burned for nothing now anyway), chaffes and seed husks, all waste streams from food and feed processing, etc, would get collected at a local power plant. Even waste with a high water content will burn if the fire is hot enough and mechanically fanned with steam driven blowers. The waste would be burned in a boiler to make high pressure steam. The steam would be used in a condenser supplemented turbine (high efficiency) to turn an electric generator. Not a single grain of human consumable food or single litre of natural gas would be needed with the system. Its all technology from the 19th century that can be made super efficient with modern digital controls. There would be little need for preprocessing of the fuel other than maybe minimal shredding and mixing. The "problem" is the the requirement of small scale local power plants that make such a system economically efficient, completely cuts the existing energy conglomerates and corporate interests out of the picture. The power plants would be owned and operated by the municipalities. The farmers would get an entirely new revenue stream from selling their waste products to the municipalities while their traditional outputs would remain completely untouched. It would be on demand power production like coal fired plants and not dependent on the whims of sun and wind. And not a single gram of "new" greenhouse gases would be produced. The other problem for the "substance abusers" is the system wouldn't produce energy in the form required for driving to the mountains to go skiing or jet trips to the Caribbean. It would however, light our homes and businesses and drive our appliances like these computers we're sitting at now. There'd be oodles of waste heat from the power plants to heat small towns. We'd have a higher cleaner standard of living, minus a few unneccesary extravagances and the potential for the peasants to aspire to being millionaire kings would be somewhat diminished! The right wing peasant wanna be kings also have a "problem" with this kind of energy system!

I have to laugh at all this trashing around over automobiles! It bears an uncanny resemblance to addicts who know the drug is running out. All this talk of "alternative fuels" is just like an alcoholic at the point of hunting through the aisles in the grocery store for the Lysol display because Liquor Store is closed. Face up to it now. The energy intensive North American lifestyle is just not sustainable on a finite planet. The great age of the automobile is in its twilight. Don't be a drunk switching over to Lysol or aftershave!

Since no one dares deny it I guess it is all about trips to the Carribean and Hawaii, big impressive farm houses and a shiny new 3/4 ton every year. Thanks for the clearing up that up for me! I'll pass it along to my pals here in the city, some of whom are politicians!

Hey, aren't there any farmers here who can answer my questions I asked earlier in the thread? I genuinely want to hear their side of things! And by the way biofuels are a fantasy. They'll never ever work as a stand alone energy industry. As it is in its current state biofuels only works with massive inputs of traditional fossil fuels. For ethanol the big energy hole is the distillation step. We use natural gas with nearly equivalent energy content to distill ethanol. As well the use of ethanol as a fraction of gasoline is a blending trick that allows the making of more gasoline from a barrel of crude. By itself ethanol is such a light, low energy content hydrocarbon you would have to fill your gas tank up four or five times more often than with regular gasoline to drive a given distance. Biodiesel is similiar in energy inputs. The big energy hole step is seperating out the fatty glycerides that would foul an IC engine. Doing this step requires about 200 to 300 mls of ethanol per litre of grain oil and the manufacture of about five grams of sodium hydroxide. The yield is about 700 to 800 mls of biodiesel. I bet many of you didn't know it takes ethanol to make biodiesel. You can run a diesel engine on unrefined vegetable oil for awhile, but, a few tanks of running on it will foul the energy with heavy carbon deposits to the point of malfunctioning. Add to all of the above the energy input needed; to til and plant a field, the manufacture and application of fertilizers and pesticides, the harvesting and seperation of grain from stalk and chaff (combining), the trucking to biofuel plant and the trucking back to farm to begin the whole cycle over again. There's no way the loop can ever be closed to become self-sufficient, much less have a marketable surplus from the cycle. Fertilizer like anhydrous ammonia is pure petroleum industry product. Even at the price per litre of human consumable alcohol its never been economical to burn whiskey to make more whiskey. If it were, the traditional distilling industry would have started doing it a long time ago. The only reason it works now is because we have huge amounts of natural gas and coal to burn in the distilling step. If the distillery isn't 21st century state of the art ultra efficient, all that really happens is the biofuel becomes a mere storage medium for the energy that was originally stored in the fossil fuels. In the end we'll all just end up paying more for home heating as natural gas supplies are used up by the industry. I'm not sure how this sucker's ride on the biofuels bandwagon got started. Thermochemistry always showed it was a poor cycle. Maybe it was desperation for trips to the Caribbean and a shiny new 3/4 ton every year? Well, perhaps a little shilling on the part of the petro-industry trying to milk more gasoline out of a barrel of crude played a role. The United States would have to plant 97% of it arable land in corn for ethanol to meet current gasoline and diesel consumpotion levels. This would be with burning something else for the distilling step.

When you get right down to it, most of the so called right wing are just wannabe kings. And most are just loser puppets of truly wealthy people who got wealthy by screwing someone or something over. They think that sucking up to rich people and their ideals will somehow gain them access to the "club". Bigger losers and puppets by far than any of those not-wealthy dirty tree hug'in hippies. Wake up idiot! They're just using you to protect their interests and they're never ever going to let you into the club! No matter how you much you spend the rest of your life sucking up to them. Oh sure, they may have allowed you enough of a reward for your fealty to generate the illusion you're wealthier than most, buts thats all you'll ever get and you'll never really get to live like they do. This mere fact alone is greater just reward than I or any other leftie could ever deliver. Puppet Loser! Of course this truth won't really sink in for you until the day you die from some industrial disease caused by all this "economic development'. And thats the cherry on top of your "reward". Even this division of left and right is a falacy perpetrated by the perpetrated elite. What exists is two camps, those who will do anything and everything to get rich (including criminal acts like murder if thats what it takes) and the rest of us who are human and care about humanity, not only our own, but that of those around us! Ah Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha......................