#286 More Lube Please

So the talk is, we’re soon to lose our postmark. Seems, against all reasonable assumptions to the contrary, it will be more efficient to send all of our mail to Tacoma to be sorted and then send it all back again. I wonder if the first item in the sorting process is to separate the Olympia mail from the Tacoma mail. Personally, I’m thinking it would have to be one efficient sorter to make up for the high cost of gas used in transporting truckloads of mail to Tacoma and truckloads of mail back to Olympia. I don’t know why it might seen more feasible to employ a few pensioners from Panorama City to do the job in their semi-retirement. How much could it cost? The single biggest expense of the postal service is its retirement fund. These people would already be retired so you wouldn’t have to kick that in. Pay them a little more than McDonalds or WalMart greeters and they would flock to be of service. I can see it now, a flock of seniors, long ears flapping, shuffling along with hips waddling like a penguin trying to hold in a suppository.
I remember this transportation thing from micro-economics. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the theory behind it, but I think it’s that you pay less for things that have been shipped from farther away and you pay more for local stuff—something about more competition in a bigger marketplace. I don’t remember. About a month into the class, I decided no one knows diddly when it comes to economics. It’s like being a meteorologist, you can master all the tools and have lots of expensive equipment and computers, and pose theories and make models till you’re blue in the face, but in the end you don’t really know if it’s going to rain till you feel drops on your nose.
The big current mystery is why the city of Bellingham, right down the street from the refineries at Anacortes, right down the pipeline from Alaska oil, has the highest gas prices in the state. Western Washington has one of the highest in the nation and we are arguably the least dependent on foreign oil. As usual, it has something to do with someone having someone else over a barrel. In this case the oil companies having us in a, shall we say, compromised position. Financial analysts say, appropriately, that the surest way to lower price is to lower demand. See classic economic theory referenced above. The problem we have, as a society that is completely dependent on oil, is that lowering demand is next to impossible. We’re kind of like the diabetic that decides to boycott his insulin manufacturer because prices are too high. He doesn’t have a lot of, as they say in the investment world, leverage. Supply and demand only works when you have a choice about the demand. So we get it in the end. And for some reason we’re all walking like penguins.
America, ya gotta love it.