9.12.2008

Pet Peeves & Pictures

One of my major pet peeves in life is people overreacting to stressful situations or potential natural disasters, like the election of Bill Clinton, hurricaines, Y2K, and the struggling economy. My first memory of being annoyed at an overreaction was the night Bill won the presidency. I was home-schooled at that time and I can remember the entire home-schooling community going into mourning, thinking that the assault on their civil liberties had begun and that all of their 8 million children were doomed to public education (gasp). Of course that didn't happen. Taxes sure were high (my parents with 6 kids living at home on a >40K salary had to make monthly IRS payments) but life as we know it did not end with the onset of the Clinton Years. And when everyone started taking money out of the banks and stocking up on food and weapons in preparation for Y2K, I could not believe it. I mean, what good is an arsenal going to do you if we cannot operate any of our electronics, cars, etc? Anyway, the behavior I witnessed today at local gas stations was on par with the gross overreactions I just described. People at Sam's Club were lined up into the street AND many were filling up cans AND CANS of gas. It was insane. I actually needed gas, unfortunately for me so I had to wait and it took about 30 minutes for me to get a turn. Come on, people. Take on for the team and pay a few cents more in gas for a few days. Overall, it will do us good in the end because all you are doing is increasing the demand, decreasing the supply and you don't need a degree in economics to know what that does to the price of gasoline. I would say that gas went up about 20 cents today in our community. In fact, the price increase was so drastic that I started receiving text messages from our local news stations about it (apparently they are about to start arresting people for price gauging around here).

So please, if you are reading this, do us all a favor and don't buy gas unless you need it. If something really awful happens and our supply of gas is completely cut-off, your one tank and a few gas cans full of gas is not going to save you. And is it really worth the $5 or $10 you are going to save?

On another note, we had a photographer friend come out to the house earlier this week and take some pictures, mostly of Elliot as he has not had many pics AT ALL taken but she took a few of the rest of us too. They turned out really well, I think. You can see a few of them on her blog.

Happy Friday!

5 comments:

Katherine Maxey said...

I'm totally with you on the unnecessary panic surrounding these events. I was working at the hospital when y2k happened so you can imagine all the chaos that ensued there. They actually had us hunker down in the break room right before midnight! Like the world was coming to an end or something! Ha! Forget about the patients... they were left to fend for themselves in their rooms. How ridiculous.
And I love the pics...Elliot is getting so big!

Katherine Maxey said...

ejm - it's matt - let the "economist" provide a basic lesson in how the oil market works; your illustration of supply and demand is, although correct in general, irrelevant in the matter of oil and gas. On the NYSE, crude oil trades on a "futures" basis, meaning speculation on what the future price of a barrel will cost. Gas prices are not directly correlated with the current market price of oil, but if the oil futures are headed up, gas prices will follow on a lagging basis. So you see, the recent spike in gas is not being set by the market (since crude was trading at <$100 barrel today). In fact, prices are rising from gauging which you mentioned. National gas and oil supply is actually up!! The whackos who are panicking and lining up at the pumps (saw the same thing here today too) are NOT going to affect the price of oil or gas either now or in the future. BTW - prices here have jumped 40-50 cents in 2 days!!

Make sense? lol

thanks for the comment re rice cakes and vmoiting on my facebook account...funny memories

ejm said...

Matt- RYC - thanks for the expert opinion. :) But now I'm curious: on the Today show this morning, they had a whole segment about how consumers changing their consumption patterns creates a shortage and drives up prices unnecessarily (esp. since the price of a barrel is DOWN)... ???

Anonymous said...

the pictures are sooo cute!

Janelle said...

Such cute pics. You are right. Elliot is a little chunk of love.