it's not a single station. If we're working in that microcosm, you're right. But since the market as a whole isn't one station, we have to look at all of the stations that is serviced by a single oil company. Those convenient to the closer station will go to the cheaper because, at least Adam Smith says, man is a rational maximizer. ANd they service tens of thousands of stations. 5c adds up pretty damned quickly. If it means driving across the street for 5c off, most, including myself, will.

[Edited on April 20, 2006 at 3:13 PM. Reason : getting rid of harsh words]

4/20/2006 3:12:57 PM

^

Quote :

"In October, Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman, PhD, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his groundbreaking work in applying psychological insights to economic theory, particularly in the areas of judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. The team's findings have countered some assumptions of traditional economic theory--that people make rational choices based on their self-interest--by showing that people frequently fail to fully analyze situations where they must make complex judgments. Instead, people often make decisions using rules of thumb rather than rational analysis, and they base those decisions on factors economists traditionally don't consider, such as fairness, past events and aversion to loss. "

4/20/2006 4:07:12 PM

This isn't a complex decision.

A gas station is selling gas for $2.75. THe one right next door is selling it for $2.65.

That's not complex.

Im' sure he deserved his nobel prize, but that bit of info you gave us has nothing to do with this conversation whatsoever.

As a matter of a fact, as a RULE OF THUMB, man is a rational maximizer. So far, every socialist theory that has tried to deunk Smith has yet to do it.

4/20/2006 4:12:31 PM

Quote :

"Instead, people often make decisions using rules of thumb rather than rational analysis"

quit relying on your rules of thumb.

4/20/2006 4:14:28 PM

Typical matthew, get dominated and then retreat to kiddie land.

4/20/2006 4:16:13 PM

its not that simple

4/20/2006 4:23:29 PM

The decision as to what gas station to go to is that simple. The economics behind the entire situation isn't that simple.

But to assume that, as a rule, a person will choose a more expensive gas station for the hell of it is a bit ridiculous.

4/20/2006 4:25:17 PM

driving across town isn't simple, nor is taking a left turn during rush hour

4/20/2006 4:30:15 PM

holy shit dude. Those are anomalies! Those aren't the norm. You have externalities, but that's 10% of the case, if that. You're trying to apply rush hour to a 24-hour situation.

4/20/2006 4:34:28 PM

fair enough.

4/20/2006 4:34:56 PM

Quote :

"wow...Kris actually posted propaganda straight from a website and expects everyone to take it as gospel..."

Wow TGD posts a google search instead of actually backing up his claim like he was asked to...

I looked at the first page of results from it and I wasn't able to find any actual bailout, I found a few talking about them asking for a bail out, and one were they got one from the whole anthrax incedent, but that's hardly getting "billions upon billions of $texas in bailouts every single fucking year, in addition to constantly hiking rates and providing shitty service"

Now, can you actually back up your claim or should I use this google search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22TGD+backing+up+a+bullshit+claim%22&btnG=Search

4/20/2006 4:56:16 PM

bttt

4/20/2006 8:32:41 PM

Quote :

"So far, every socialist theory that has tried to deunk Smith has yet to do it."

See Keynesian economics. The existance of aggregate supply and demand prove that the market cannot adequately sustain itself without government involvement. Either you have never taken a macro course or you haven't taken one since 1936.

4/20/2006 10:26:26 PM

Yes, I have studied Keynesian economics. Just because I'm not using it as a basis of argument doesn't mean I'm ignorant of the subject.

Many say that Keynesian economics and the New Deal ended the Great Depression. Many buy that. It is a theory and therefore I reserve my right not to buy it. If you ask me, price caps, higher taxes, regulation, and government interference actually prolonged the Great Depression longer than it needed to be.

From the CATO institute:

Quote :

"Mounting evidence, however, makes clear that poor people were principal victims of the New Deal. The evidence has been developed by dozens of economists -- including two Nobel Prize winners -- at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of California (Berkeley) and University of Chicago, among other universities. New Deal taxes were major job destroyers during the 1930s, prolonging unemployment that averaged 17%. Higher business taxes meant that employers had less money for growth and jobs. Social Security excise taxes on payrolls made it more expensive for employers to hire people, which discouraged hiring. Other New Deal programs destroyed jobs, too. For example, the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) cut back production and forced wages above market levels, making it more expensive for employers to hire people - blacks alone were estimated to have lost some 500,000 jobs because of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) cut back farm production and devastated black tenant farmers who needed work. The National Labor Relations Act (1935) gave unions monopoly bargaining power in workplaces and led to violent strikes and compulsory unionization of mass production industries. Unions secured above-market wages, triggering big layoffs and helping to usher in the depression of 1938. What about the good supposedly done by New Deal spending programs? These didn't increase the number of jobs in the economy, because the money spent on New Deal projects came from taxpayers who consequently had less money to spend on food, coats, cars, books and other things that would have stimulated the economy. This is a classic case of the seen versus the unseen -- we can see the jobs created by New Deal spending, but we cannot see jobs destroyed by New Deal taxing."

Keynes, sir, can suck my ass.

[Edited on April 20, 2006 at 11:12 PM. Reason : .]

4/20/2006 11:10:57 PM

And if you're a Keynsian subscriber, you better fucking support the goddam president. He's the fucking definition of deficit spending and don't let me catch your ass anywhere close to here condemning him for deficit spending and soaring debt. That is what Keynsian economics is all a-fucking-bout.

Quote :

"Deficit Spending Government deficit spending would provide additional market demand, pushing prices up and stimulating more hirin. Public-works projects would “prime the pump.” This policy would continue until “full employment” was attained. But since, in Keynes’s view, businessmen were usually shortsighted and irrational in their fears about investment prospects, the private sector would always lag behind in creating jobs. The government would have to be constantly at the monetary and fiscal controls, injecting spending into the economy to prevent it from sinking back into unacceptable levels of unemployment. In Keynes’s conception of the world, governments guided by his ideas would be wise and farseeing, assuring that the mass unemployment of the 1930s never happened again. Government would manipulate interest rates, the level of prices, and the amount and direction of investment to assure that society had high employment, socially beneficial investment, and general economic stability. There were critics of Keynesian economics in the 1940s and 1950s, but they were virtually ignored by academic economists and policymakers.12 Some mainstream macroeconomists also took Keynes to task. But many of their criticisms were couched in terms clearly meant not to antagonize their Keynesian colleagues. Then in 1959 came Henry Hazlitt’s The Failure of the “New Economics.”13 What was unique about Hazlitt’s exposition was his chapter-by-chapter dissection of the arguments in Keynes’s General Theory.14 Central to Keynes’s theory was his insistence that “Say’s Law” was wrong in claiming that “supply creates its own demand.” Just because people supply goods on the market does not mean they will demand what others are selling. They may abstain from spending by holding idle cash balances. Thus there could be a general glut of goods on the market."

Quote :

"Say’s Law Hazlitt showed that Keynes had misunderstood what the Jean-Baptiste Say and other nineteenth-century economists meant. Goods can virtually always find buyers if prices are sufficiently attractive. The pre-Keynesian “classical” economists never denied that goods can go unsold and labor unemployed if suppliers fail to adjust their prices and wages to match existing market demand. Furthermore, Hazlitt explained, many of the classical economists, especially John Stuart Mill, understood that individuals could “hoard” money rather than immediately spend it. But this was most frequently due to the temporary uncertainties of an economic crisis, usually caused by a prior, unstable inflationary boom.15 The central flaw in Keynes’s thinking, Hazlitt insisted, was his unwillingness to acknowledge that the high unemployment in Great Britain in the 1920s and the United States in the 1930s was caused by government intervention, including the empowering of labor unions, that made many prices and wages virtually “rigid.” Political and special-interest power prevented markets from competitively re-establishing a balance between supply and demand for various goods. Hence, the market was trapped in wage and price distortions that destroyed employment and production opportunities, resulting in the Great Depression. (Hazlitt did not deny that the contraction of the money supply in the early 1930s increased the degree to which prices and wages had to fall to re-establish full employment.) Hazlitt considered Keynes’s inflationary “fix” crude and dangerous. First, Hazlitt pointed out that Keynes’s focus on macroeconomic “aggregates” concealed the microeconomic relationships among a multitude of individual prices and wages. The price level, wage level, total output, aggregate demand, and aggregate supply were all statistical fictions that had no reality in the actual market. Thus the wage level could not be too high relative to the general price level. But in the 1930s many wages for different types of labor were out of balance with the prices of individual goods sold on the market. What was needed to restore full employment was an adjustment of numerous individual wages and resource prices to the lower prices of many consumer goods. The extent to which any individual money wage or resource price might have to adjust downwards depended on the distinct supply and demand conditions in each of the individual markets."

Hazlitt:

Quote :

"Because Keynes, with his lump, aggregate thinking, is opposed to restoring employment or equilibrium by small, gradual, piecemeal adjustments . . . we must achieve the same result by inflating the money supply and raising the price level, so everybody’s real wages are slashed by the same percentage. . . . The Keynesian remedy, in short, is like changing the lock to avoid changing to the right key, or like adjusting the piano to the stool instead of the stool to the piano."

[Edited on April 20, 2006 at 11:36 PM. Reason : Formatting]

4/20/2006 11:31:05 PM

Quote :

"Many buy that. It is a theory and therefore I reserve my right not to buy it."

And salisburyboy has the right not to buy the whole holocaust thing.

Quote :

"If you ask me, price caps, higher taxes, regulation, and government interference actually prolonged the Great Depression longer than it needed to be."

No, they tried your way and it didn't end it. They tried it his way and it ended nearly immediately.

Quote :

"From the CATO institute:"

Can I link to http://www.marxistheman.com? I know of many more less biased studies that came up with different interpretations. I'd rather you attempt to argue agianst his actual economic theory as we all know history can be interepted a million different ways. Explain to me why aggregate supply and demand do not exist.

Quote :

"And if you're a Keynsian subscriber, you better fucking support the goddam president. He's the fucking definition of deficit spending and don't let me catch your ass anywhere close to here condemning him for deficit spending and soaring debt."

Keynes never stated that all deficit spending is good, if you know anything about economics you would know that blanket statements like that are never accurate, economics is never that simple.

Let's see what you actually know, not the first few links you can pull off google. If I wanted to argue with Hazlitt I'd go dig him up. And if I wanted to argue with CATO I'd just start hitting myself with a hammer and save some time.

4/21/2006 12:53:04 AM

Quote :

"Kris: Wow TGD posts a google search instead of actually backing up his claim like he was asked to..."

Someone sounds a little bitter about getting intellectually gang-raped repeatedly by just about ever TWWer in TSB. Illiteracy will do that to you I guess...

On a side note, when was the last time FedEx or UPS ran up multi-billion dollar deficits every single year since 1998?

4/21/2006 2:42:01 AM

Quote :

"Someone sounds a little bitter about getting intellectually gang-raped repeatedly by just about ever TWWer in TSB. Illiteracy will do that to you I guess..."

Please TGD, words can hurt too, don't make me cry

Quote :

"On a side note, when was the last time FedEx or UPS ran up multi-billion dollar deficits every single year since 1998?"

They aren't required to run the same service.

So are you going to back up your claim?

4/21/2006 2:51:36 AM

my solution to the oil problem is to use the entire state of maine for refineries

then i'd let that 700 million barrel reserve bush set up to be tapped til about 200 million are left and we could have cheap ass gas for a little bit

4/21/2006 3:50:47 AM

you talking about the not-coincidentally named strategic reserve?

and if we're gonna relax environmental restrictions and have more refineries, let's not put them in a place like Maine that's relatively unmarred.

[Edited on April 21, 2006 at 4:06 AM. Reason : asdf]

4/21/2006 4:05:24 AM

Put them in new jersey, or better yet, spend the money not on refineries, but on implementing an infrastructure for alternate fuels like biodiesel. Start pushing that.

4/21/2006 4:46:09 AM

ethanol has more potential

4/21/2006 6:34:25 AM

Kris, you didn't combat a single thing I said. You combatted who I quotes which is hardly a retort. You brought up Keynes, I debated Keynesian economics. I brought quotes from the CATO institute and Hazlitt and you just attack the CATO institute and Hazlitt. Why don't you combat what they say. I think that would be much more valid.

Quote :

"Many buy that. It is a theory and therefore I reserve my right not to buy it."

Quote :

"And salisburyboy has the right not to buy the whole holocaust thing."

Ridiculous. the holocaust isn't a theory.

Quote :

"No, they tried your way and it didn't end it. They tried it his way and it ended nearly immediately."

Orly? Um, no it didn't. The New Deal started in 32 and 33. The Depression started in Oct. of 29. There was ANOTHER depression in 38. And the whole thing wasn't over until the well into the war. Read some history. Your timeline is off by a decade.

4/21/2006 8:26:32 AM

^^ethanol is the worst choice

4/21/2006 9:46:49 AM

bttt

4/21/2006 11:52:26 AM

Quote :

"I'll give you an analogy. Let's say I want to buy your stuff from you and sell it at a higher price. Would you be more likely to sell it for a lower price if you were a crack addict or if you were sober? It's in my best interest for you to be a crack addict so you need money. The same concept applies here."

that's a great analogy

4/21/2006 11:59:13 AM

Quote :

"Kris, you didn't combat a single thing I said."

That's because you didn't say anything, you just posted works from an organization with it's head so far up it's own ass it gets a headache when it farts. And then you continued on to post a selection from a man who most likely understands keynes less than you. How would you respond if I just posted excerpts off a google search?

Quote :

"You brought up Keynes, I debated Keynesian economics."

You didn't debate shit, you posted articles that debated. I don't care to argue with something that can't talk back.

Quote :

"Why don't you combat what they say. I think that would be much more valid."

Why don't you try actually presenting some kind of arguement and I'd respond.

Quote :

"Ridiculous. the holocaust isn't a theory."

In all fairness, you can't prove it.

Quote :

"There was ANOTHER depression in 38. And the whole thing wasn't over until the well into the war."

Only because Roosevelt didn't go far enough. I can see why, many times it's easier to step into a pool rather than diving in.

4/23/2006 10:05:36 PM

Quote :

"In all fairness, you can't prove it. "

In all fairness, you can't prove anything as proof is always relative to perception.

4/24/2006 12:47:37 AM

Even without the whole Descartian metaphysical thing, history becomes difficult to prove after it happens.

4/24/2006 1:11:11 AM