Some whining Yankee wrote:
What pisses me off is that in NYC the gas prices are ridiculous high... $1.35/Gal is the regular gas, drive just a few miles over a tunnel or bridge to n NJ, it's $1.00 or $.99 depending on which pump you hit... go a bit south, say VA, and in some areas it drops as low as $0.87 a gallon!
Over in Europe, prices are mostly about $1 -- per liter. Back here in California, prices have been varying a lot, and are generally higher in areas with lots of people, lots of money, or lots of restrictions on gas stations. Here in San Francisco, it's about $1.30, and down in Silicon Valley it's mostly about $1.20, with some cheaper stations and some more expensive. We have different gas - for environmental reasons, they add chemicals designed to pollute water and irritate people's lungs (while reducing smog a bit.) Those New Jersey prices, while lower than New York, are still articifially high, since they're "full-service". The People's Republic of New Jersey *knows* that regular untrained citizens can't be trusted to pump their own gasoline reliably - otherwise you'd be having frequent explosions at gasoline stations like you do in the rest of the country. Any time the legislature begins to suggest legalizing self-service gas, small gas station owners pretending to be little old ladies write to all the newspapers protesting that they'd have to pay a lot more money to have gas pumped for them and how dare these politicians be so mean to YOUR grandmothers, and the threat disappears again for a few years. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639