By the way, I got in a conversation about this last night with a bunch of people. Does it seem odd to you that -- this is a departure from the story but I don't want to forget this -- does it seem odd to you that a gallon of bottled water is more expensive than a gallon of gasoline, and nobody complains about this? Now, you don't buy gallons of water. You know, a tankfull at a time, but still let's examine this. Imagine you're in the oil industry. What do you have to do? First you have to hire all kinds of gizmos and people to find where the oil is. Sometimes it's out in the Gulf or in the North Sea miles down. You have to find it, then you have to drill down there, then you have to find a way to get it up. Once you've got the oil up then you've got to transport it from wherever you found it to a refinery, then you have to refine it, then you have to distribute it to gas stations and airports and wherever else the refined product is used. And after you do all that, a gallon of that product costs less than a gallon of bottled water. Can you imagine this oil industry exec saying, "This isn't fair. Look it all of my up-front costs to get that barrel of oil that will become X-number of gallons of gasoline, and these water guys are simply turning on a faucet somewhere, holding a jug underneath it, saying it's from a well, not even putting fluoride in it, slapping a label on it, and selling it for more than gasoline." And when the price of gasoline goes up a nickel, there are shrieks of outrage and conspiracy and shortages. Nobody even notices what the price of water is. The question is popularly asked, "Okay, senator, what's the price of a gallon of milk?" I now know it's $3.19 depending on where you are. But ask somebody, what's the a gallon of water, nobody can tell you. They don't buy it by the gallon. They buy it in these little six-pack, 1.6 liter bottles and they chug it out there while they're pretending they're athletes, while they jog along the bike path, bike trail and so forth. Now, if you had to go to a pump and get your water by the tank load, and you saw the pump zinging up the price as gasoline does, you'd be complaining about it, and plus we can live without gasoline, I mean we couldn't, of course, but literally could not live without water. We would shrivel up and die. Not true with gasoline. We'd have to find other things, but it just amazes me what people get upset about. There's no production costs in water. All you've got to do is wait for the rain then find a faucet. In fact, you let the government purify it for you. You don't even pay for that. You just put your jug underneath the faucet say it comes from a well or a spring that nobody else can find, and then sell it. It's the same stuff for the most part. It's not regulated; we don't know what's in it. Could be a bunch of amoeba in there for all we know. But yet the price of gasoline goes up and (screaming) panic, "Mabel, we're not going to be able to have our vacation this summer, we're not going to be able to drive to Del Rey Beach and get to the Disney cruise boat." It just struck me, it just strikes me funny. Now, if you were taking a shower and they had a gasoline pump in there as the shower water is running and you're being charged I guarantee you people would be worried about the price of water. So it's just different. But I pitty these poor oil executives, can you imagine, they've got to hate the water guys that are making billions, and you go to a grocery store, do you know what the biggest section in the grocery store is now? One single product is water, bottled water. After that it's the beer, after that it's the wine, then the potato chips, the healthy stuff takes up the smallest part of the grocery store now because we are obese. http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site__031904/content/institute.guest.html
Interesting Post Perhaps the people who buy bottled water don't complain about either the price of gas or water because they have plenty of money. I live on a barrier island and my water comes from a reverse osmosis plant and the price is about the same as all the other places that I have ever lived. So even when water is highly processed it can still be cheap. Since my water has twice the arsenic content allowable, we drink nothing but "bottled water" but we distill it ourselves and you should see what is left in the unit after the tap water is boiled off. Now that I know what is actually in the stuff, I would never drink tap water again. regards
When some idiot's pouring 30 gallons of gas at a crack into his 5-7 miles per gallon $50K Hummer H2 - he's not likely to complain about the price of his Pellegrino. New Hummer slogan - drive a Hummer, it'll pass anything on the road, except a gas station Another Hummer slogan - the Hummer, for the person with more dollars than sense