Price Check in the Gas and Diesel Aisle...

An interesting conversation on the diesel distillates market:


Consider this a reminder of the fact that the price of any given distillate can become disconnected from
From the article.... Something the average American has no knowledge of:
“We’re coming up to what’s known as turnaround season, where you have regularly scheduled maintenance. They have turnarounds in September and October to get ready for winter and then they do turnarounds. They don’t turnaround every refinery, but then there’ll be turnarounds, let’s say, in March and April getting ready for summer.

I worked the turnarounds in the refineries. This year there is a shortage of skilled workers, a shortage of replacement parts and the "Old Guy's" who built and knew refineries from the inside out have all retired. We now have refinery engineers who never had a screwdriver in their hand. Most of the current refinery equipment is older than the 2021 graduating class of engineers. A laptop can not replace a leaking gasket on a high pressure steam valve. An IPhone can not isolate a shorted wire in a circuit that is up in the pipe rack...
America is in a RTF (Run To Fail) mode. Every failure jacks up the price of the product.
 
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$3.40 for regular in FWB, Florida.

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Next day media reports Opec agrees to a small output increase.

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Did ya get the memo... Joe?
 
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Things could have been so much different if the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was named properly many years ago.

Instead of Federal Bureau of Investigation, it should have been named Federal Investigative Bureau...........

FIB

Much more appropriate.
 
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Short crude for financial security.
what do you think it's going to bottom at? and over what time range?
edit - you don't thing oil sellers will use this as an excuse to try to crank the prices?
8/11/22 U.S. offshore oil producers Shell, Chevron and Equinor on Thursday halted operations at facilities pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day, citing an onshore pipeline leak that a port official said should take about a day to fix.​
- net loss of 600k barrels per day of oil production

 
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what do you think it's going to bottom at? and over what time range?
edit - you don't thing oil sellers will use this as an excuse to try to crank the prices?
8/11/22 U.S. offshore oil producers Shell, Chevron and Equinor on Thursday halted operations at facilities pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day, citing an onshore pipeline leak that a port official said should take about a day to fix.​
- net loss of 600k barrels per day of oil production

I’m looking for $75 by December to close everything out again.

World wide demand destruction due to EV’s and people being broke AF.

People have changed their spending habits, and it will take awhile for them to start blowing money again if gas gets cheap.
 
I believe if the Republicans don't take over at least one house of Congress, gas will be back up to prices of a month or so by February, March at the latest. Then the price will start to decline again by June/July just in time for the prez election in November.

My Magic 8 Ball told me so......
 
An old psych exercise.
Imagine the worst a situation could be - 6/1/2023.... Gas prices have returned to $3 / gallon but it is rationed to getting 10 gallons on even days for some and odd days for others.
Imagine the best a situation could be - 6/1/2023..... Gas prices holding at $5 / gallon, no rationing, all you can afford to buy. Ground meat (80/20) $12 / lb....

;)
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I believe if the Republicans don't take over at least one house of Congress, gas will be back up to prices of a month or so by February, March at the latest. Then the price will start to decline again by June/July just in time for the prez election in November.

My Magic 8 Ball told me so......
My thinking is China and Russia won't make a move until after the elections. The current situation is beneficial to them imo. After that the game is on. They'll have two years to get what they want accomplished. If that happens all bets are off. my 2 cents from the peanut gallery.
 
Here's an interesting chart
LOL...
California ranks third in the nation in oil refining capacity. The state’s 17 refineries – located in the Central Valley, Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area – have a combined capacity of nearly two million barrels per calendar day.

 
LOL...
California ranks third in the nation in oil refining capacity. The state’s 17 refineries – located in the Central Valley, Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area – have a combined capacity of nearly two million barrels per calendar day.

yup and my understanding is a lot of it it shipped out of state. At least that's what I heard. That and the amount of taxes makes for high prices. Plus the voters mistakenly voted to increase gas taxes there.
 
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Home owner's insurance and property taxes are two categories that consumers can't simply cut back on.
If mine goes up again.. I'll strongly consider not buying home owners insurance.. Without a mortgage, it's an option.
I wonder after the next big storm, how many people you'll see starting up gofundme to help since they lost their home without insurance.
talk about rock/hard-place

-Property tax really isnt going up much for me since I am homesteaded in Texas. 10% increase which is the state maximum they are allowed.
Yeah, but it's a temporary ceiling... it will be +10%/year increase until they catch up.. You'll pay eventually.
 
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If mine goes up again.. I'll strongly consider not buying home owners insurance.. Without a mortgage, it's an option.
I wonder after the next big storm, how many people you'll see starting up gofundme to help since they lost their home without insurance.
talk about rock/hard-place


Yeah, but it's a temporary ceiling... it will be +10%/year increase until they catch up.. You'll pay eventually.

I'm not going to try to save $1400 a year and potentially lose $600,000 in my home and another $100,000+ in belongings. All it takes is one lightning strike, a fault appliance or any number of small things. I've only been in my home about 10 years and I've had the insurance company replace my roof due to a hailstorm. That's 10 years of insurance premiums.

Isn't worth it to my family.
 
Yeah, but it's a temporary ceiling... it will be +10%/year increase until they catch up.. You'll pay eventually.

A 10% increase maximum each year means they WILL increase by the maximum each year
(ask me how I know HA!)

That means every 8 years your property taxes double.

So you know, you've been in your house 24 years and your property tax bill is higher than your mortgage bill used to be...
 
I'm not going to try to save $1400 a year and potentially lose $600,000 in my home and another $100,000+ in belongings. All it takes is one lightning strike, a fault appliance or any number of small things. I've only been in my home about 10 years and I've had the insurance company replace my roof due to a hailstorm. That's 10 years of insurance premiums.

Isn't worth it to my family.

The other big thing is liability coverage that comes with your homeowner's policy can be a big deal if something goes wrong.
(that being said, I suggest it is really worth it to buy a personal umbrella liability insurance policy as well.)
 
A 10% increase maximum each year means they WILL increase by the maximum each year
(ask me how I know HA!)

That means every 8 years your property taxes double.

So you know, you've been in your house 24 years and your property tax bill is higher than your mortgage bill used to be...

They will try to keep going 10% every year, but at a certain point its pretty easy to protest when they try to exceed the market value and if they cant support it except "we only went up 10%" you will win the protest. Ive never protested before because every year the value placed falls within the 10% and I check zillow, realtor.com, etc... for values and comps and see "is their value in line with the market" and so far, ive been at or below market on the property tax appraisal. 8 years now.

I had a buddy the total property value increased well in excess of 10% on the appraisal. They said "oh your land that was worth 10k is now worth 100k, but your dwelling is worth the same as it was last year" and he protested and won because it doesnt work that way. He's like "this is bull shit and you are just trying to get around the law here, fuck you, ill sue you if I have to". They backed off instantly. He still got fucked for 10%, but he said the total property value last year was up over 20% so...
 
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They will try to keep going 10% every year, but at a certain point its pretty easy to protest when they try to exceed the market value and if they cant support it except "we only went up 10%" you will win the protest. Ive never protested before because every year the value placed falls within the 10% and I check zillow, realtor.com, etc... for values and comps and see "is their value in line with the market" and so far, ive been at or below market on the property tax appraisal. 8 years now.

I had a buddy the total property value increased well in excess of 10% on the appraisal. They said "oh your land that was worth 10k is now worth 100k, but your dwelling is worth the same as it was last year" and he protested and won because it doesnt work that way. He's like "this is bull shit and you are just trying to get around the law here, fuck you, ill sue you if I have to". They backed off instantly. He still got fucked for 10%, but he said the total property value last year was up over 20% so...

I've done several tax protests.
Unless the real estate market is totally flat or going down and / or inflation is also like near flat, it's hard to win.
In our county, they have squeezing you down to a fine science.
If you have a homestead exemption, they will almost always stick to right at the 10% mark to the dollar as they have almost a lock on winning.

My friend has done several protests as well, some he won, ones where the county was really stretching on new construction and having to pull in comparisons from other counties.

Some he didn't win, especially for properties without homestead exemptions.

It sounds like in your buddies case, the local appraisal district was a bit greedy and stupid and not a finely tuned extortion machine like where I live.
 
where the county was really stretching on new construction and having to pull in comparisons from other counties.

Thats bull shit. Im pretty sure my realtor told me its law(I have no clue if thats true or not) that first year appraisal is set at your purchase price because you had a legit appraisal done and paid for that set it there. If they tried to come in way high you can simply take your legit paid for appraisal and protest with that and get it reset.

Our first year tax appraisal was exactly what we paid for our house... so it seems our county follows that portion of the law(again, if such a law exists).

Or you could be like my neighbor and forget to submit your homestead documents and in this crazy time his value instead of being like 375k they paid for their house suddenly jumps into the 650k range LOL... He called me up scrambling... I said go to the country appraisal office and figure out what to do... Turns out you can go back 3 years(might have been 2) and actually get a tax refund in that situation...
 
Thats bull shit. Im pretty sure my realtor told me its law(I have no clue if thats true or not) that first year appraisal is set at your purchase price because you had a legit appraisal done and paid for that set it there. If they tried to come in way high you can simply take your legit paid for appraisal and protest with that and get it reset.

Our first year tax appraisal was exactly what we paid for our house... so it seems our county follows that portion of the law(again, if such a law exists).

Or you could be like my neighbor and forget to submit your homestead documents and in this crazy time his value instead of being like 375k they paid for their house suddenly jumps into the 650k range LOL... He called me up scrambling... I said go to the country appraisal office and figure out what to do... Turns out you can go back 3 years(might have been 2) and actually get a tax refund in that situation...

When you are doing new construction of larger scale projects that are not single home stuff, they work things a bit differently in how they decide they want to try coming up with the tax value. Of course this gets fun if the construction project stretches over a few years as each year is a new fun and games on taxes.
 
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Of course this gets fun if the construction project stretches over a few years as each year is a new fun and games on taxes.

Yea the old "what was on your land January 1st"...

Luckily when we were building they had only poured the slab just before Christmas so January 1st there were no "improvements" at least visible, so my taxes were based on "unimproved land" from January 1st...
 
Yea the old "what was on your land January 1st"...

Luckily when we were building they had only poured the slab just before Christmas so January 1st there were no "improvements" at least visible, so my taxes were based on "unimproved land" from January 1st...

Around here they are not above blatantly using drones to trespass over your land to check stuff out to see if there is anything they can tax extra.
 
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Around here they are not above blatantly using drones to trespass over your land to check stuff out to see if there is anything they can tax extra.

They tried to tax me for 5 "deck's" on my old house. I guess a deck adds value to the house/property...

I went to the county and asked "what is this, I dont have 1 deck on my ground level house, let alone 5?" and they pulled up a google maps photo. I said "those are garden beds" and showed them a picture.... It got promptly removed... fucking crazy.
 
They tried to tax me for 5 "deck's" on my old house. I guess a deck adds value to the house/property...

I went to the county and asked "what is this, I dont have 1 deck on my ground level house, let alone 5?" and they pulled up a google maps photo. I said "those are garden beds" and showed them a picture.... It got promptly removed... fucking crazy.
Guilty until proven innocent.
 
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