From Lost River Road in Stuart, Florida:
(the “lost river” runs right along Interstate 95 and features a Marriott as well as a Cracker Barrel)
The $4.20 price for gasoline is actually not the lowest that we’ve recently seen in Florida. One station had it for $3.98. By contrast, the Google shows that the Chevron gas station where I used to fill up near HP Labs in Palo Alto is at $6.16.
Related:
- “Average Price of Gas in LA County Inches Toward $6 a Gallon” (NBC)
- “National gas prices continue to drop while California prices still on the rise” (Mercury News)
The difference — is it taxes or what?
Jack: I don’t think that the difference can’t be explained by taxes. https://igentax.com/gas-tax-state/ says California collects 53 cents/gallon in tax (2020 data) while Florida collects 34 cents (and does a much better job building and maintaining roads!). Maskachusetts wants to encourage people to destroy Mother Earth with CO2 emissions, so the tax is set at a low 24 cents per gallon. This enables people to drive their pavement-melting SUVs to Climate Change rallies.
Most democrats live in red or neutral states, so they project their own experiences on what they think a democrat state is like. Idaho has a 33 cent gas tax, so they assume Calif* must have only 40 cent gas tax at most. Calif* also requires additives other states don’t. Don’t tell that to Fl* democrats.
Calif* lawmakers have a fix for the high gas cost, they want to offer a $400 gas rebate https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Who-would-qualify-for-California-400-gas-rebate-17009984.php
This is wonderful news for a Calif* who has an EV car. z/s/he EV car was subsidized by tax payers will now get some free cash too.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/09/qa-why-are-california-gas-prices-1-32-higher-than-the-national-average/
Excise taxes PLUS cap-and-trade (which subsidies EVs and bullet trains) PLUS special fuel formulations (which make the state reliant on a small and fragile supply chain)
I think you buried the lead. I would be more interested in what you used to do in Palo Alto near HP labs.
JJ: That was 1982 and you have to go back to a world when there were companies other than Intel that made processors.
I irritated everyone by trying to purchase, take home, and use as a coffee table a massive CISC computer prototype that featured blue smoked glass doors. The top managers were hauling it away to a warehouse, admitted that it would likely never see daylight again, and nonetheless refused to sell it to me on the grounds that it had cost $millions to develop.
I played a small role in the development of HP’s RISC computers, which eventually morphed into Intel’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_instruction_set_computer for RISC and CISC definitions)
@Phil – Thanks for sharing! I am sure 1982 will be featured prominently in your autobiography someday with a chapter titled: “How I “RISC’d” it all to save money on furniture”
JJ wins comment of the day!
@Toucan Sam – Glad I could finally contributed something of value!
In London we see CA’s $6/gal and laugh. Currently ~£1.66/l, apparently ~$8.30/US gallon. Also, you can pay the city $16/day to drive your 7-year-old diesel, if foolish enough to have one, inside the near suburbs (you should have an exempt historic vehicle from 1972 or earlier, maybe a ’69 Pontiac Firebird convertible as my father drove in the ’70s).
On the “positive” side, as so much of the fuel price is a per litre tax, it’s only up ~30¢ this year. Quite a different story for domestic heating gas and oil.
“In London we see CA’s $6/gal and laugh. Currently ~£1.66/l, apparently ~$8.30/US gallon
The problem in CA is people often “need” to drive a 6000 lb (?kg) vehicles through an hour of rush hour traffic one way to get to work. Or at least they did before corona panic and the increased popularity of telecommuting.
RISC machines!
Take me wayback…anybody remember Symbolics? I worked in an AI shop with LISP machines. Along came Sun Microsystems, which cut their throats. Along came Oracle…
I’ll never forget my briefing with the project manager for the Symbolics hardware. I had some Unix under my fingers, but my editor was vi, not emacs. So he’s showing me the delete keystrokes. Not the delete key, but keystrokes — Command-Meta-y-y. I just laughed out loud. My bad.
Being an assembly language grunt I never really got that recursion thing the MIT guys loved so much. Dude, you’re in an infinite loop here.
No! (It (exits (here)))
Ah.
vi is keystroke – based, yy stands for yank – copy line in vi. I do not recall yy delete line command in emacs.
RISC processor architecture was considered more promising then x86 architecture back in early-mid 1990th. Did not realize that HP had its own RISC processor, was somewhat familiar with IBM and DEC RIC processors