Log in
Register
Home
Forums
New posts
Search forums
What's new
Featured content
New posts
New profile posts
Latest activity
News
Members
Current visitors
New profile posts
Search profile posts
Features
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search titles only
By:
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Search forums
Menu
Install the app
Install
Reply to thread
Home
Forums
Off Topic
The Basement
Gibson raided
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Message
<blockquote data-quote="W. Mark Hellinger" data-source="post: 39695" data-attributes="member: 692"><p>Re: Gibson raided</p><p></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">Here's the stupidest thing I've heard all day:</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">This morning (and last night) on the local intertube “news” was all kinds of "atta-boys"... and we finally "won one for the Gipper" concerning a $40,000,000.00 grant handed out to two of our local universities to develop bio-fuels from surplus wood products for light aircraft.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">$40,000,000.00 for what do you say???!!! WTFO??? Is there some surplus of dumptruck loads of cash that need to be dumped off a cavernous cliff?</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">Pictures on the intertube of the "project" showed talking heads milling around prop driven (twin engine) pleasure aircrafts (Beech Bonanza type)… beaming a look of “man… this is gonna be really cool, I can tell it already”.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">What wrong with this picture?</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">1) I was not of the impression there was some acute shortage of pleasure aircraft avgas. And if there is... we're talking pleasure aircrafts, not grain barges headed to Africa or Bangladesh. Seems to me that the minimum twin engine gas aircraft cost of membership into that club is $50K+. Yearly annuals, insurance, and whatever else is probably a minimum of $5K/yr. Operating costs for the occasional weekend warrior enthusiast of such pleasure crafts probably well exceeds a buck or two a mile. I suspect fuel costs, while probably significant, are probably not a make or break decision for such enthusiasts.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">2) Avgas cost: I suspect Avgas probably rolls out of the discharge pipes right along with all the other fuels. I suspect there are no highway taxes involved with avgas. I suspect the possibly somewhat higher price at the pump for avgas is because of shelf life and special care and feeding costs, and point of delivery/convenience pricing. All of which would probably apply to the price of avgas regardless of it's source (dead dinosaur poop fertilized ferns or Ponderosa Pine bark).</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">3) What mountainous piles of waste tree bio-mass are they fixing to capitalize on? From what I've seen (and I live in the great Pacific Northwest)... when it comes to contemporary logging and processing of timber bio-products... it's pretty-much all used... to the point where a serious brewing problem is that there's not enough returning biomass to the soil with modern take all timber bio-products operations. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">Ok... so somebody saw fit to dump $40,000,000.00 into a program where the need is extremely questionable, and the source is extremely questionable, and the science is questionable or worse (like been there, done that and it didn’t really work) and the pay-off is beyond questionable, and the justification for all of this is beyond madness… and this is the first I’ve heard of any public mandate to “somehow find an alternative source for pleasure craft avgas”… I have yet to hear how this ties into a solution for how to deal with the elephant standing in the middle of the room… other than that this grant should offer yet another avenue to alleviate us of the seemingly raging federal budget cash disposal problem. Inna previou life I worked as a busboy at a convention center where the problem was that the sink-er-ators (garbage disposals) didn't have the capacity to process the surplus lobster tails fast enough that needed to be cleared from the tables before dissert was served.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">40 ma... ma... million! that's probably somewhere on the order of what any 10 of us have earned in 4 lifetimes. 40 ba... ba... billion... or ta... la-la-la trillion. eh? just rolls off the tongue. eh? Whatever happened to that jobs program where folks packed water up a hill to pour it in a hole that fed a waterfall that amused those below?</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'"></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #222222"><span style="font-family: 'Verdana'">Maybe I'm missing something.</span></span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="W. Mark Hellinger, post: 39695, member: 692"] Re: Gibson raided [COLOR=#222222][FONT=Verdana]Here's the stupidest thing I've heard all day: This morning (and last night) on the local intertube “news” was all kinds of "atta-boys"... and we finally "won one for the Gipper" concerning a $40,000,000.00 grant handed out to two of our local universities to develop bio-fuels from surplus wood products for light aircraft. $40,000,000.00 for what do you say???!!! WTFO??? Is there some surplus of dumptruck loads of cash that need to be dumped off a cavernous cliff? Pictures on the intertube of the "project" showed talking heads milling around prop driven (twin engine) pleasure aircrafts (Beech Bonanza type)… beaming a look of “man… this is gonna be really cool, I can tell it already”. What wrong with this picture? 1) I was not of the impression there was some acute shortage of pleasure aircraft avgas. And if there is... we're talking pleasure aircrafts, not grain barges headed to Africa or Bangladesh. Seems to me that the minimum twin engine gas aircraft cost of membership into that club is $50K+. Yearly annuals, insurance, and whatever else is probably a minimum of $5K/yr. Operating costs for the occasional weekend warrior enthusiast of such pleasure crafts probably well exceeds a buck or two a mile. I suspect fuel costs, while probably significant, are probably not a make or break decision for such enthusiasts. 2) Avgas cost: I suspect Avgas probably rolls out of the discharge pipes right along with all the other fuels. I suspect there are no highway taxes involved with avgas. I suspect the possibly somewhat higher price at the pump for avgas is because of shelf life and special care and feeding costs, and point of delivery/convenience pricing. All of which would probably apply to the price of avgas regardless of it's source (dead dinosaur poop fertilized ferns or Ponderosa Pine bark). 3) What mountainous piles of waste tree bio-mass are they fixing to capitalize on? From what I've seen (and I live in the great Pacific Northwest)... when it comes to contemporary logging and processing of timber bio-products... it's pretty-much all used... to the point where a serious brewing problem is that there's not enough returning biomass to the soil with modern take all timber bio-products operations. Ok... so somebody saw fit to dump $40,000,000.00 into a program where the need is extremely questionable, and the source is extremely questionable, and the science is questionable or worse (like been there, done that and it didn’t really work) and the pay-off is beyond questionable, and the justification for all of this is beyond madness… and this is the first I’ve heard of any public mandate to “somehow find an alternative source for pleasure craft avgas”… I have yet to hear how this ties into a solution for how to deal with the elephant standing in the middle of the room… other than that this grant should offer yet another avenue to alleviate us of the seemingly raging federal budget cash disposal problem. Inna previou life I worked as a busboy at a convention center where the problem was that the sink-er-ators (garbage disposals) didn't have the capacity to process the surplus lobster tails fast enough that needed to be cleared from the tables before dissert was served. 40 ma... ma... million! that's probably somewhere on the order of what any 10 of us have earned in 4 lifetimes. 40 ba... ba... billion... or ta... la-la-la trillion. eh? just rolls off the tongue. eh? Whatever happened to that jobs program where folks packed water up a hill to pour it in a hole that fed a waterfall that amused those below? Maybe I'm missing something.[/FONT][/COLOR] [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Home
Forums
Off Topic
The Basement
Gibson raided
Top
Bottom
Sign-up
or
log in
to join the discussion today!
