This email has made the rounds every year and I've always wondered::
How would they make a net loss? All the people who didn't fuel up on that day would fuel up the next day so on the 22nd they would lose money and on the 23rd they would make heaps more.
The choking on the stockpile thing makes sense though...On principal though I promise not to fuel up on the 22nd!
This offends reason, not only because (as should be obvious) it only defers petrol purchases rather than suspends them, but because the calculations its based on are obviously bullshit.
Even if people actually stopped driving altogether for the day (which would effectively remove a day's worth of petrol sales from the system) the loss would be nothing like $4.6b. Australia has a petrol consumption of around 25Gl/year. That's 68Ml/day. At $1.45/l, that's a daily revenue of $100M/day. That's revenue, not profit. Being very generous and assuming a profit margin of 10%, that's only $10 million. Somewhat different to $4.6 billion.
Of the total petrol sales, a larger percentage goes to the GST and petrol excise taxes than goes to the oil companies as profit. Boycotting petrol for a day does more damage to the provision of public services than it does to oil companies' bottom lines.
And damnit, it's arse, not ass. The all-caps was bad enough.
Comments 13
How was the trip? still in japan?
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How would they make a net loss? All the people who didn't fuel up on that day would fuel up the next day so on the 22nd they would lose money and on the 23rd they would make heaps more.
The choking on the stockpile thing makes sense though...On principal though I promise not to fuel up on the 22nd!
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Even if people actually stopped driving altogether for the day (which would effectively remove a day's worth of petrol sales from the system) the loss would be nothing like $4.6b. Australia has a petrol consumption of around 25Gl/year. That's 68Ml/day. At $1.45/l, that's a daily revenue of $100M/day. That's revenue, not profit. Being very generous and assuming a profit margin of 10%, that's only $10 million. Somewhat different to $4.6 billion.
Of the total petrol sales, a larger percentage goes to the GST and petrol excise taxes than goes to the oil companies as profit. Boycotting petrol for a day does more damage to the provision of public services than it does to oil companies' bottom lines.
And damnit, it's arse, not ass. The all-caps was bad enough.
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Glad to hear you had a great time in Japan lady!
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