Quote:
Originally posted by Rocky Raab
I hope I'm not glazed over, Billy. But here goes...
(Oh, first let me congratulate all for keeping this discussion civil. Good guys all here at HC. Some of the other boards I read are wall-to-wall flames over this topic. You folks are the best.)
Not to put words in Fab's mouth, but the way I read his "cake" post was this: We all make our choices, but having made them, we ought to suck it up and live with the inevitable results of those choices.
Neither Fab's nor Madman's choices are good - or bad. They just are. I'd guess that those choices were made because each of them thought them the best solution. Maybe they were then, and maybe they still are the best. Or maybe not. Nobody knows what the next five minutes will bring us.
But I can promise that whatever happens, it probably wasn't expected!
The choices we make every day are a crap shoot. Maybe that SUV saved your life on a snowy road, and you don't even know it. Maybe that short commute did the same. On the other hand, people die every day because of choices they made. Maybe we just wanted five minutes more sleep, and that put us a tad late, and so we run that long yellow light, and... You get the idea.
Back to the point of the thread (at last LOL!)...
There's no point bitching about the price of gas. It is what it is. You can pay it (that's one decision) or not (and that's another) but we all need to abide by the results of the choice. Nothing you can do as an individual will change it. Nothing, that is, unless you single-handedly build your own refinery (and lotsa luck with THAT decision, the envirowhackos and laws being what they are).
But if you do build it, don't whine about how expensive it is to run the thing, and how you can't break even unless you raise the prices. It was your choice!
Thanks again for the calm and rational talk, guys. If we get together, the beer's on me.
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Rocky you are right in your word as usual, and building my own refinery is on my list of things to do as soon as I fine myself and old deisel car or truck.
I am seriously thinking that if gas stays up over $2.50 a gallon for too long I am going to start looking into the local restraunts that have used cooking oil and offer to haul it away for free.
Most large restraunts have lots of used cooking oil that they use in the deepfryers and they have to pay to have it hauled off.
Instead I am thinking about getting a old deisel vehicle and making Bio-deisel out of that oil. It is easy to do and would help me as well as the restraunts.
for any of you that already run deisel trucks or cars you should look into it.
The recipe consists of used cooking oil, Lye (reddevil drain cleaner), and a small amount of methanol (racing fuel)
I watched a guy on TV make 35 gallons and it took 35 gallons of used cooking oil, added about a cup of lye and a half gallon of racing fuel (methanol) and filtered it to get out any suspended food particles and pumped it straight into an F-350 deisel truck.
All of the on campus shuttle buses at the University of Maryland run on biodeisel made this way, the science department makes the fuel for them.
I'll wait and see if the prices drop back down first but if they don't this is seriously a solution that I am thinking about giving a try.
When Cigarettes went sky high in Maryland and the police started cracking the whip on buying them in Virginia and bringing them back to Maryland I bought my own cigarette machine, bulk tobacco, filter tubes and made my own cigarettes for almost a year. Now that the law has been cleared up and set that it is legal to buy up to 2 cartons for personal use, I normally go to Va for something or other about once a month and I just pick up 2 carton for me and 2 for the wife and since she doesn't smoke very often they last me till the next time I get to Va.
Point being it wouldn't be a stretch for me to setup a strainer and mix up my own bio-deisel out in the garage to save a couple hundre a month on my gas bill