Gov. Brown takes emergency action to try to reduce gas prices

[mgk920]

I was mindlessly browsing through the racks in the magazine section of the Appleton, WI Pvblic Library several years ago and just for the h*** of it, I picked up a copy of the journal of one of those major activist environmental/BANANA organizations and what said it all to me is that when I opened its front cover, the first thing that I saw was a multi-page foldout ad for the biggest luxury soove on the market.



Mike

[NE2]

Marketing people are dumb.

[US71]

Marketing people are dumb.

Not if you buy what they're selling.

[Brandon]

Marketing people are dumb.

Usually they know their target audience very well.  They rarely put an ad where it won't make some money for their client.  Why do you think a lot of sugary cereals and toy manufacturers had ads on Saturday morning cartoons?  You place your ad where it will be noticed by your potential consumer.  In this case, the consumer of the journal that Mike mentioned happens to have a bizarre sounding conflict.  They are very NIMBY-esque, yet they love their SUVs.  Yet, it's not as incompatible as it may seem.

One thing I have noticed, from watching places like Homer Township, Illinois (now the Village of Homer Glen) is that some of these folks move outward wanting to escape the congestion of the city and inner suburbs.  They buy land in a subdivision, usually large homes on 1/4 acre lots, out in what is then the middle of nowhere.  Of course, they, by the nature of them being there, bring congestion and traffic.  Then, because they have built in the area, land values go up and farmers then sell to other developers who want to make money by building houses and commercial businesses.  The farmers sell as the land can be sold for more than they can make growing corn or soybeans.  Thus, the land gets developed and brings in more congestion and traffic.

The pioneers, if you will, get pissy about this as it ruins the so-called "rural atmosphere" that attracted them in the first place.  Thus, they fight any and all improvements in order to keep others out of their area.  it fails to work for the other economic factors, namely the farmers and developers, above.  What these pioneers fail to take into account it that their own development of the land is what brought the congestion and traffic in the first place.  Their own houses helped to increase the local property values and made it more economical for their local farmers to sell out to developers.

In many respects, these folks created their own problem that they then try to solve through NIMBYism.  They don't want to realize that they created their own problem in the first place by building out there.  To go back to the initial part of this, the advertisers in the NIMBY-esque journal aren't quite so strange being there after all.  Many of these pioneers tend to be well-off, and buy luxury SUVs and other such items.  hence why they bought their larger homes on larger lots in the first place.

[myosh_tino]

In an attempt to bring this discussion back on topic, prices are plummeting in California.  Prices have dropped about 70-80 cents a gallon to the point that some stations around me are below $4 a gallon.  I gassed up today at a Valero and paid $3.97.  At the Santa Clara Costco, gas there is $3.85 but the lines were very long.

[flowmotion]

One thing I have noticed, from watching places like Homer Township, Illinois (now the Village of Homer Glen) is that some of these folks move outward wanting to escape the congestion of the city and inner suburbs.  They buy land in a subdivision, usually large homes on 1/4 acre lots, out in what is then the middle of nowhere.  Of course, they, by the nature of them being there, bring congestion and traffic.  Then, because they have built in the area, land values go up and farmers then sell to other developers who want to make money by building houses and commercial businesses.  The farmers sell as the land can be sold for more than they can make growing corn or soybeans.  Thus, the land gets developed and brings in more congestion and traffic.

The pioneers, if you will, get pissy about this as it ruins the so-called "rural atmosphere" that attracted them in the first place.  Thus, they fight any and all improvements in order to keep others out of their area.

Years ago, I used to work with a few of these people that insisted they lived in the "country" because they had a half-acre lot out in the exurbs somewhere. They saw no irony in the fact they were close enough to commute into the central city for work, and they were only five minutes away from walmart.

They would complain about the developers and increased zoning and property regulations. (Some of them had houses that weren't built up to code.) But they would also complain about the farmers too, when the wind blew manure smell into their house.

One of the upsides of the housing crisis is that these exurban areas got covered with subdivisions, and then landvalues went into the toilet. People have figured out that commuting in from the "country" isn't practical with current gas prices, unless it's a very upper-class area.