Match madness is fine. Shitty big 10 teams are. It. Like how in the world is watching 2 teams score a combined 45 points in 20 minutes entertaining?
I guess I’m the same then. The tournament is pretty much the only college bb that I watch. I can’t bring myself to watch a regular season game. The quality of play is just so far below the NBA.
I don’t even watch that much college bb, but I will be in Vegas during March Madness for the first time ever.
I did that once and actually ended up watching fewer games than I do during normal years. It wasn’t the best planned trip, but finding a good place to watch the games is non-trivial. Literally everyone else is trying to do the same thing.
Oh, I don’t plan on watching any games other than what is showing in the poker room.
I was playing in Hammond during one of the wins in Loyola Chicago’s cinderella run a few years back. The room was excited and the cheering at the end of the game was one of the loudest I’ve heard in a poker room, but no one at my table could name a single player on the roster.
I just finished the audio book Endurance. Riveting. I need recommendations for more good expedition or mountaineering type books.
As if the players on the team mattered. It was all Sister Jean.
There are gas stations scattered all over LA that consistently have gas $1-$1.50 higher than the norm.
And not always in crazy places like right next to the rental car return. There was one right across the street from a normal station, and one by me in a very non-touristy area. I would always be surprised if I drove by and saw a single person filling up.
I’ve always wondered why they did this, and never been able to come up with a good explanation.
I speculated that maybe the one by me made his real money on car repairs and didn’t want to hassle with selling lots of gas. Or maybe the owner was in a feud with Shell over something. I asked the clerk one time and he had no idea why the owner did it. Eventually that owner sold, and now the station has normal prices and is always busy.
I was very excited that LA Times was finally going to get to the bottom of this burning question for me but nope. They’re just shrug emoji too. They even asked some wonky gas prices expert who said he’s never heard of such a thing. Maybe come down out of your ivory tower and drive around LA buddy.
The one owner the manage to get a hold of sounds like he’s in a good area to still snag enough customers. But that is definitely not true of the other two I’m familiar with.
I guess it will just be one of life’s enduring mysteries for me.
I wonder what the profit margins are on gas. Like if you snag 5 customers an hour at a $1.50 bump, is that more profit than 100 customers an hour at normal prices?
I don’t know what that means
B1G is number 1 in conference offensive efficiency this year
I love the intensity of college basketball vs the stand around one on one game of the pros. But I still only watch March madness.
Gas station owners have always claimed their profit on gas is around a nickel a gallon.
My theory for the expensive stations is even if they have 10% of the customers they make more money.
This slickly produced Frontline-style video on China and theft of IT seems kind of creepy, considering the source. In the old days our security people used to show us crappy films to warn of the danger, especially from… France.
I like zikzak’s theory better.
They’re probably laundering money. You want to get just enough credit card transactions to somewhat believably be a real business, but you can only move so much money through it so you don’t want a lot of real business. Thus, high prices to scare most people away, but not all. Sure, it’s not going to hold up to a close examination, but who’s going to care that much about some random gas station that does an unusually large amount of cash sales?
Can you break this part down for me further? I don’t understand why more real business isn’t better. The more real business you have the more diluted the laundered money is (which presumably makes it harder to detect).
If you’re doing a whole gas station’s worth of laundered money and a whole gas station’s worth of real business, then you would be bringing in twice as much money as a comparable legit business. Whereas if you do 20% of your intake from legit business, you could have 80% from illegal cash without raising that particular red flag.
Yeah that might be it. Plus less wear and tear on the pumps, the tanks, etc.
Interesting. Seems like a pretty public way to launder money. But yeah maybe no one cares. Definitely one angle I hadn’t thought of. That would also explain why no one wants to talk to reporters or anyone else about why their prices are high.