Hey... I don't think your post is "unpopular", on the contray, I for one appreciate it. You have provided information that is both helpful and enlightening.

I am sorry that you feel 99.9% of America fails to understand you (your occupation) but understand that you are not alone. There are many other occupations out there experiencing the same "misunderstanding" as you.

My own take on this is that we have really put this on ourselves. Yes the demand is up but not to the extent that the costs would dictate. We have not built new refineries in years and are prohibited from drilling for new sources even though we have the safe technology to do so. We can look for alternative fues all we want but in the meantime we have millions of gasolene dependent vehicles that will be around for a long time. I'm all for substitute fuels but what about all of the other demands for oil? And at the cost of reducing the acreage that we used to plant into crops for food? Kinda dumb, I think.

Location: Wareham, MA

Well, this post may have had absolutely nothing to do with diecast fire apparatus (despite the stretch made in the initial post to link it somehow), but at least it allowed Chuck to get in another of his populist rants about "Dubya" and his evil friends...

Location: Woodbridge, VA

and we won't even start on the idiot bankers whose irresponsibility created the sub prime crisis....sorry Jeff but this is one area that has been created by the decisions of boardrooms, and has affected the whole world because of incompetent corporate decisions....they should be held accountable. Lending huge amounts of money to people who could not even begin to meet repayments is totally irresponsible.

If we dig deep enough, I'm sure we'll find that Code 3 Collectibles (along with Dub'ya) is responsible for this mess.