A year-ish ago I moved a couple miles. My old favorite station is now a bit out of my way for much, not all, routine daily erranding. My change in zip code and county also moved me from a working-class area to a ruling-class area.
Gas at my old station is $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon less than at my new nearby stations. Even though all these stations are major name brands. The same-brand difference is about $0.75 to $1.00 per gallon but my old station is by far the closest of its brand to my new residence.
My car gets less than great gas mileage and burns premium. A 20 gallon fill (i.e. fumes to brimful) is $20 to $30 cheaper if I make a special trip to drive the almost 5 miles round trip. Which trip burns about a quart, so about $1.10, of fuel. If I can combine that fill-up trip with anything else in that direction the marginal driving is often more like 2 miles, and may in fact be zero.
Seems worthwhile to me almost no matter what we assume the non-fuel costs of operation for the car are. The ~15 minutes of worst case drive time are being compensated at ~$100/hour. Not bad wages for a retired dude.
Admittedly this is a very odd situation. After a year I remain flabbergasted at the price difference. But it holds up whether absolute prices are high or low. The old station is not especially cheap by comparison to the general Miami metroblob average pricing; my newly local stations are simply engaged in gouging the richie riches Who. Do. Not. Care.
Or maybe they’re engaged in barely breaking even after paying absolutely insane prices for their ground lease to some sleazy real estate magnate who long ago bought up all the land in a ritzy area and now is gouging everybody. No way to tell, but I’m glad I have an alternative.
But isn’t Elmo supposed to the reigning master of “agile development”? Isn’t he the guy who deployed one harebrained scheme after another – all of them globally – until he finally reduced Twitter to the shambles it is today? Abandoning checkmarks as actual authenticators and then selling them for a monthly fee was a much bigger deal than this. If Elmo is suddenly doing test markets, it’s likely on someone else’s advice. Maybe Yaccarino somehow got through to him.
Is Musk leading a pseudo-intellectual movement? Don’t really know what you’re talking about? No problem, just throw in a couple of buzzwords, reference a few complicated concepts, and you’re good to go.
