TRBLSHTR wrote:

:-? Hey vince-don't they have any dairies down there,or is it that drought that has your milk prices so high?

We have plenty of dairies mate...in fact my eldest daughter and her very soon to be ex husband have managed dairies of and on for quite some years.

Biggest problem we have is our Govt has de-regulated many industries...one of them being the milk industry. They all claimed that this would lead to increased competition and lower prices, whereas in fact it hasn't. Oh, they had all the correct words in the sentence....just in the wrong order...it should read "lower competition and increased prices". The buggers collude with one another to set prices, even though it is illegal to do so.

The oil companies are watched all the time by our Consumer Price mob to try to catch them out at price setting amongst themselves. What the buggers are doing now is turning off the standard ULP pumps, and putting an Out of Service label on them, for a day or so a week and leaving the Premium ULP pumps on and telling customers that they have a problem with the pumps. At 7c per litre extra for PULP they make a tidy profit from those that they catch with this little trick. The TV Current Affairs programs have just caught onto it and have bought it to the attention of the Govt and the public. The first company caught out doing it is Woolworths. Woolworths have a 4c a litre discount docket if you spend more than $30 in one of their stores so I suppose they saw this as a way of recovering the 4c a litre and increasing profits by a further 3c a litre. Bastards !!

Yes 'Mitri...we work on the imperial gallon over here, 4.5 litres to the gallon. Actually we don't even use the gallon anymore.... its just old buggers like me that convert the metric back to imperial because it is the imperial measurements that mean something to me. AUD$1.33 ($2.65/2 litres) per litre x 4.5 is AUD$5.99 per gallon.

Cheers, Vince

Yah, we are not supposed to use the Gallon ether here but we do anyways.

I grew up knowing one gallon = 3.8L ... basically the US Gallon don't use the Imperial Gallon, cause most Gallon sized items here come from the USA.

By the way I'm not a old bugger and I still use the Imperial system.

Dimitri

No "Mitri you are using a combination of US and Imperial if you believe a gallon is 3.8L cause an Imperial gallon is 4.546L. US guarts, pints, gallons etc are different size then in Imp. Imperial gallons, quarts, pints etc are bigger. Before the metric BS we used imperial measurements and that's what I still use or that's the way I (and others) still think at times.

Yes I'm getting to be an old bugger but not near as old as "some" that reside here.

Yes there is a combination. But I was making a point if you buy something "resembling" a gallon container now its ether 3.8L or rounding up to 4L making it more in line with the US gallon then the Imperial Gallon as they could have simply sized it as 4.5L to keep the old Imperial Gallon but they don't.

Like our pop bottles are marked in ml but are in fact US fl oz. A pop or beer can is 355ml because thats 12 US fl oz. And our pop bottles that list 591ml or 600ml (rounded up) are sized that way as they are 20 US fl oz.

In Europe for example when I went there a pop bottle always sized as 500ml or a half liter to be 100% metric.

Dimitri

This is true ........ and now I understand what you're saying. (typing)

Humph...!!! A slam at The Bushmaster (The One And Only)...Guess I'll contact my lawyer...Oh Vince.....

Bushy wrote:

Guess I'll contact my lawyer...Oh Vince.....

You rang good Sir....

1895ss wrote:

Yes I'm getting to be an old bugger but not near as old as "some" that reside here.

Ah...I see the problem. 1895essess....a slanderous and unmitigatedly incorrect comment Sir. To quote a learned and wise friend (my dear old Dad)...

"A Man is only as old as he feels, and he's not old till he stops feeling."

Now correct me if I'm wrong, which I know that I am not....I have it on very good authority that Bushy is still feeling and has no intention to stop feeling until he is in fact old and worn out....which is generally considered to be a very long way off....something to do with mountain air, mountain women and horse power I believe. Bushy is feeling great, probably feeling much better than most, so I contend that he is in fact not old, but simply looking a little that way due to a hard childhood.

Consequently I respectfully ask that you withdraw you ill informed and slanderous comment, to which my client Bushy has taken umbrage.

Failure to do so may render you liable to a minimum of thirty five lashes with a wet noodle to a delicate appendage of your body.

Sir, We await your humble and profoundly sincere reply.

Vincenzo the Braggadocio

Yeh. 1895zz. And all that too...

Added thoughts: one of the dying myths about oil is that it is fossil based only. Which isn't too surprising, considering just how many dinosaurs it would take to fuel the world. More and more scientists are in accord that crude petroleum is abiotic and, further, that the bulk of proven reserves is enough to carry modern society into the future, not for decades, but for centuries. The US alone, excluding ANWAR, has over 600 billion barrels of known reserves and the US consumption rate is 4 billion barrels annually, including fuel and food and industrial applications. Add to those US reserves the proven reserves in Mexico, Canada and Brasil and the amount is staggering.

The US gets most of its oil not from the Middle East alone, but, from Canada and Mexico as well. Extracting the new reserves is problematic as those underground reserves are a long, long way down and much of it is sand or shale locked. But, oil companies have been investing heavily in the extraction technology to the tune of billions of dollars. It will cost billions more, but, it is certainly within the technology to do so. What may be of concern is ROTC or return on total capital investment.

So many begrudge the profits of Big Oil, that oil companies are rightfully concerned about the security of investment levels and about the stability of governments. Still, it should be noted, that Big Oil's return on investment annually is far less than most other businesses. Too, their applications for added refinery capacity has been thwarted over and over again to the extent that capacity barely exceeds demand today. When demand exceeds capacity big price increases are inevitable.

It seems to me we are dealing less with a resource matter and more with a problematic process and distorted public image that would suggest high pump prices are the fault of oil companies. Care to guess how much of that pump price is combined taxes from extraction, production, distribution, wholesale and retail?

The funny thing about the "huge" oil company profits that people keep mentioning is that really sure lets say Exxon Mobil had 40 Billion in profits last year, but at the same time had a revenue of 400 billion dollars. Which means only about 10% of their income is actual profit.

On the other hand Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company made 8 billion with of profits on 49 billion of revenue, thats a 16% profit margin, a higher profit margin then Exxon Oil. And Microsoft, made 14 billion in profits with a revenue of 51 billion dollars thats a profit margin of thats over 27%!

Now who makes all the "money" ??

As for oil being "Fossil fuel" I don't really believe that, sure some of the near ground tar sands may be indeed be fossil fuels but I cannot believe that crude oil formed from organic remains as deep as the majority of underground crude is located.

Dimitri

Below is the therory that is taught in most geology, environmental, and other earth science college courses.

Most scientists agree that hydrocarbons (oil and gas) are biogenic - formed from the remains of plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. This theory is supported by the fact that many underground oil deposits contain chemicals that are only known in plants that live on the Earths surface.

Organisms, mostly algae and tiny animals called plankton, died and sank to the bottom of the seas in which they lived. They were covered with mud and sand then, over millions of years, buried deep under other sediments. Temperature in the Earth’s crust increases with depth. This has warmed the plant and animal remains, causing them to produce oil and gas.

Cary

Yup Cary that it is. Mainly in the west, the Russians and other Eastern countries have thought otherwise for a while:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...eum_origin

Dimitri

Science is mostly theory. There’s no way you can prove most of it. If the general consensus follows one train of thought, it becomes an accepted fact. Take carbon dating as an example—there is no way you can prove that all the theories of physics have remained constant throughout time and space that would, without a doubt, allow one to make a guaranteed statement of irrefutable fact. Think about that one for a while.

Cary

Cary,

I don't buy what science says as "fact" much anymore. Too many times has the Scientific community said something was the end all and be all fact when it was still really only a theory and then 20-30 or even 50 years down the line it was shot down and "proven" wrong with more "facts".

Dimitri

Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see. Can't go too wrong then.

Science is really still more hypothesis than fact. They can prove a lot of things....but not everything, and it is increases in technology that allow scientists to move forward and either prove or disprove existing theories. Then we have yet another hyposthesis awaiting definitive proof.

Science is an incredibly fascinating subject...especially when applied to our particular sport...firearms and reloading and understanding the application of scientific principles in an endeavour to find the 'perfect' load and bullet combination for a given firearm and the vagaries of our firearm in relation to its materials of construction and assembly. Then we have to try to second guess nature and take into account gravity, the elments, and of course the science of the human anatomy and our ideosyncrasis.

Its all good fun....frustrating at times, but good fun.

Cheers, Vince