Running on empty
May 19, 2015 6:12 AM Subscribe

"But what if you cut out all the cars taking a detour for the gas station versus one truck going directly to each car?" A new startup that, for a $7 surcharge, sends a tanker truck to your car to fill it with gas saving you the trouble of having to drive your car to a gas station.
posted by octothorpe (165 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

I foresee no issues with overworked fuel truck drivers on suburban roads not designed for heavy goods vehicles in the future. No sir.
posted by Dysk at 6:17 AM on May 19, 2015 [28 favorites]

Mac, Charlie and Dennis came up with this 7 years ago!
posted by girlmightlive at 6:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [46 favorites]

There are definitely too few gas stations that are all miles and miles away from, say, roads.

/eyeroll.
posted by Dashy at 6:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I... what?

Filld currently has one fuel truck operating in the affluent neighborhoods of southern Silicon Valley: Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. So far he says business has been booming...

Oh. This is not a service meant for people like me.

I mean, I think you can definitely argue that this is a service that some people will want, and it may thrive. But I don't think you can argue that it's environmentally beneficial. How many people are really making big detours to purchase gas, vs. just, you know, stopping at the next gas station on their route?
posted by obfuscation at 6:21 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

This is 100% making up a need and then selling people on it. Marketing at its...finest?
posted by xingcat at 6:22 AM on May 19, 2015 [19 favorites]

The gasoline thing is only temporary while they get their battery delivery business in shape, right?
posted by alms at 6:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Filld currently has one fuel truck operating in the affluent neighborhoods of southern Silicon Valley...

Because, y'know, it's such an inconvenience, having to top-off your Bently at the same place where all those plebeian Civic and Fiesta owners go.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:28 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

Hahahah innovators gotta disrupt
posted by vuron at 6:31 AM on May 19, 2015 [19 favorites]

Well, if you are a daily commuter to a 9–5, filling up your car can actually be a pretty annoying hassle in a lot of places. Getting off the highway, getting to a pump (not always trivial...), and getting back on the highway can take a lot of time. In the South Bay or other massive traffic snarls (LA, Atlanta), it could add half an hour or more to an already-ridiculous commute. Even in a smaller urban area, where I worked about seven miles from home, I dreaded needing to fill up on the way home because it turned a 30 minute drive into nearly an hour.

I don't think this is a particularly vile idea.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:33 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

No, the paying for drivers thing is only temporary until they get the robots working.
posted by straight at 6:34 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, and of course, filling stations are understandably usually in areas with low land value, which correlates with crime. I have been approached and borderline mugged ("aggressive panhandling," I believe is the term) while filling up cars two times. (Heading to ATL and SFO.) I am an average-sized white man wearing normal clothes and driving a normal car; I can imagine that women, people with disabilities, or who drive fancier cars might be more apprehensive about that sort of situation than myself.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:44 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't get the snark here. This isn't for me but it makes sense. The economics are easy to figure for the company. For certain customers - as sonic meat machine says - this makes a big difference that could easily be worth $7. I could see my wife using this service because she drives a lot, often has little time to stop for gas, and hates getting gas more than she hates spending $7. If she came out of an appointment or went to the car in the morning with a full tank she'd be quite happy.

This seems to not be very different from the fresh grocery delivery companies that are doing well enough to at least still be in business. Again I don't need it because I can walk to the store or drive if I need to, but I can see the usefulness. The comparison to Amazon that he makes is not way off either.

I do wonder what kind of trucks they are using for fueling though because I could see weight or clearance restrictions and maneuverability to where the car is being a problem. If it's just the pickups that are in the video that should be easy, but it seems like they'd have to top off themselves fairly often and then they lose any environmental edge they claim.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 6:45 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

No, the paying for drivers thing is only temporary until they get the robots working.

If you work for a living, you can go to sleep every night with a smile on your face, secure in the knowledge that your existence infuriates Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:47 AM on May 19, 2015 [23 favorites]

If I had a company that offered perks like free lunch, dry cleaning on premises, I would also arrange for this truck to come to my lot daily. I would eat the surcharge while my workers paid for the gas. Getting filled up while you are doing something else is a great benefit. This thing does not have to go to suburban homes.
posted by AugustWest at 6:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [25 favorites]

Replace the gas with charged batteries delivered to my electric car, where they are swapped out in seconds because they were so cleverly designed. No costly installation of charging centers, no worry about being caught somewhere without a plug! Skip the need to build out a new infrastructure of charging stations, etc.
posted by cubby at 6:52 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I found myself last night attempting to drive to an event in Manhattan with two crying babies in the backseat. When the warning light on the dash popped on to indicate I was out of gas, and I realized I had to reroute and delay by at least 15 minutes to fill up, I would gladly have paid an even higher surcharge than Filld is currently asking for a full tank of gas delivered while I was busy eating my dinner of crow and humble pie.

This startup needs to take it to the next level: Bikes delivering gas to stranded cars. Who else is going to be able to weave through a Manhattan traffic jam to get gas to the right car?

(Dangerous, schmangerous.)
posted by clawsoon at 6:53 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

Oh, and of course, filling stations are understandably usually in areas with low land value, which correlates with crime.

I'm willing to bet that people who have to deal with that on a routine basis aren't going to be able to afford the extra $7 a pop to fill up at home.
posted by Etrigan at 6:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

This would be a wonderful idea in a limited sort of situation. I recall almost 10 years ago when, shortly after Katrina, hurricane Rita pointed her bad self at Houston. It seemed like half the population decided to get the hell out of town. In the 100-mile-long backups people were running out of gas. The stations, if you could get to them, were dry as well. The gas trucks were stuck in the same traffic. People were suffering and even dying in their cars in the heat. A fill-up truck service would have been very welcome by the people in those lines, with the price not an object.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 6:57 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I probably shouldn't give them ideas, but it would be ideal if someone could come gas up the car and then wash it and detail it while I was at work. I mean, if I had a car. It seems like coming out to the most perfect version of your car on Friday afternoon after the Car Fairies had been would be lovely.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:59 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

It may be a bad idea. It may be a good idea. In a case like this, let the market decide.

There's quite a buoyant (ho ho) equivalent system that's been going on in the UK for centuries, with various canal boats delivering engine and heating fuel (and much more besides) to canalside properties and other boats. It's more convenient these days with mobile phones and email, but the basic idea is very sound in the right circumstances. The delivery boats are also a big part of the social life on the cut, as there's plenty of gossip to deliver alongside the nutty slack.
posted by Devonian at 7:01 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

The gas trucks were stuck in the same traffic. People were suffering and even dying in their cars in the heat. A fill-up truck service would have been very welcome by the people in those lines, with the price not an object.

Maybe a fill-up helicopter service?
posted by notyou at 7:01 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm willing to bet that people who have to deal with that on a routine basis aren't going to be able to afford the extra $7 a pop to fill up at home.

Not sure what you mean; "the car is almost out of gas" knows nothing of neighborhood boundaries. I am middle class and that didn't stop me from needing to fill up in relatively bad neighborhoods.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:04 AM on May 19, 2015

The problem with the economics of this are that rather than have people come to the filling station you are in effect creating a situation where a big bulky fuel truck is having to drive all sorts of inefficient patterns in order to meet customer needs. While this in theory can be covered by the cost of the fuel + service upcharge it's also a very good way of externalizing the externalities of the business model. There is all sorts of environmental costs being accrued by running a fueling truck all over creation and the no doubt extensive amount of idling in between service runs.

It's basically a tool for the elite to avoid the hassle of dealing with plebs at a gas station. I understand the appeal because they are nasty and brutish sorts but I can't see this being viable outside of a limited geographical area (too dense and you can't really navigate a truck effectively, too sparse and the time and distance between service runs makes it nonviable). Plus in most communities this would be a luxury than almost nobody would be willing to afford. Basically I can see it being viable in select areas of California and some big urban areas but not really dense urban spaces like NYC.
posted by vuron at 7:05 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

seems like the environmental and safety regulations will catch up with these folks and make it impossible or uneconomic

My cynical pessimistic side thinks they'll just Uber-fy their service and hire a bunch of 1099 "employees" that bring and load up their own trucks on their own dime and then just skim the cream off their profits. Any crashes or environmental problems will be put firmly on the driver.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:07 AM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

It may be a bad idea. It may be a good idea. In a case like this, let the market decide.

The market is an idiot. Let's decide through democratic decision making processes instead.

Yes, this is exactly how my knee jerks whenever anyone utters the phrase "let the market decide." To my credit, though, the market is an idiot, and in most cases letting it decide on anything is in fact a terrible idea.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 7:07 AM on May 19, 2015 [33 favorites]

Yeah, I don't see this as any different or worse than a dry cleaner dropping off your shirts at work. I don't do that or need it but I could see why it would be a handy service to have. Maybe if I did this I wouldn't play Russian Roulette with my car every couple of weeks and push it to the absolute limit of an empty tank before filling up.

My main concern would be a big fuel truck driving around in a parking lot and the potential for fuel spills at each fill-up. Do the trucks have some sort of fire suppression system? I trust these folks would not be able to do business without all the proper safety devices in place.

Come to think of it, I would probably pay $7.00 for someone to fill up my car every two of weeks while it sat in the lot at the train station. Anyone who has ever had a windshield magically replaced while at work can understand how convenient services like this can be.
posted by bondcliff at 7:08 AM on May 19, 2015

In many places this is exactly how heating oil is delivered: a big tanker coming to your house and pumping away. There are regulations around home storage of that oil, but the whole process of domestic service seems to be pretty established. Many farms and businesses are already supplied with diesel in this way.
posted by Thing at 7:12 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

This bugs me because the problem they're trying to solve is caused by high property values and nimbyism. There's absolutely no good reason for there not to be a gas station convenient to a wealthy, car-driven suburban community, but there often isn't, because, well, no one can afford to build a gas station in town, and they're so unsightly! So I guess we'll add gas stations to the list of terrible things we can hide in poorer communities now. Ugh.
posted by phooky at 7:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]

"Let the market decide" only works (and by "works" I mean something along the lines of "maximizes utility") when everybody has more-or-less the same income/wealth. As soon as you get significant inequality, the market starts to provide lots of things that make the rich slightly happier while providing few things to relieve the misery of the poor.
posted by clawsoon at 7:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

I agree with backseatpilot - seems like the environmental and safety regulations will catch up with these folks and make it impossible or uneconomic. I don't think most people will dig the idea of heavily laden fuel trucks tooling around town, possibly getting into wrecks and/or spilling gasoline.

I can't see the burden of environmental regulations stopping the service. Gas stations have a TON of regulatory oversight involved in maintaining underground storage tanks (USTs) and piping systems, and they stay in business. Depending on where these guys source their gas, they may be maintaining one UST system (but again, gas stations already do that). I assume the trucks hold over 1,320-gallons, so they'll need a spill plan (SPCC), which is relatively cheap. The trucks will need placards and their drivers will need appropriate DOT and Hazwopper training. Not sure on vapor recovery requirements in CA for delivery trucks, and the local Fire Depts may have some requirements depending on where the trucks park. But overall, I don't see keeping these guys compliant being that much more complicated than keeping your typical gas station operation compliant.

Moreover, we already have a fleet of petroleum delivery trucks going into neighborhoods in large swaths of the US -- the heating oil delivery trucks. They get into a fair number of accidents and they cause a fair number of releases, and the state regulators make them address those as they occur. But we haven't stopped using heating oil (yet).

That being said, I can't see there being enough people who are willing to pay a $7 surcharge on a tank of gas for this to be viable nationwide.
posted by pie ninja at 7:14 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't get the snark here.

Well, it's really easy to say "Rich people, amirite?" But this would work for a lot of people across the board. We live in a rural village where there is no gas station, and my husband has to fill up the car either before or after he catches the bus in a larger town near us. The closest gas station is a 10 minute drive past the bus station, so assuming he only spends ten minutes waiting in the queue, filling up and paying, means an extra thirty minutes that he either has to spend in the morning or the evening. Either way, that's thirty minutes less he gets to spend with our toddler, who he sees precious little of during the week, anyway. $7 would be worth it
posted by lollymccatburglar at 7:14 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

sonic neat machine: on a routine basis is the key thing there. This service isn't designed for people who live and work near gas stations in sketchy neighborhoods, nor even for people who occasionally find themselves in sketchy neighborhoods with a gauge on E. It's designed for people who just don't want to bother with any gas station and are willing to pay a premium to avoid it.

Despite the creator's story about wanting a mid-drive refueling, it looks like Filld is far more designed for doing this at your home or office on a less emergency basis. Would you rather fill up your car at a sketchy gas station or sit around in that sketchy neighborhood waiting for a truck to be dispatched to you?
posted by Etrigan at 7:17 AM on May 19, 2015

Although in that case much less worth it for the company, which is why they're operating in (what I assume are) the burbs?
posted by ominous_paws at 7:17 AM on May 19, 2015

if it can't fill me up on the highway like a midair refueling plane... i ain't buyin!!!!
posted by MangyCarface at 7:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]

I would use this service. Sometimes I have long days where I'm too exhausted to want to deal with the gas station.
posted by corb at 7:21 AM on May 19, 2015

This is an extremely common service on industrial and large construction sites. Guys drive around on a schedule delivering fuel to trucks, equipment, generators and heaters. They don't use a huge tanker but rather a 1 or 2 ton truck with a large(maybe a thousand gallons) tidy tank and a pump. And it works because it is cheaper than paying some guy making $30+ dollars an hour to make a round trip into town for fuel even if the equipment is licensed for public road use. The start up costs are low (you can lease everything you need) so watch the market get flooded with copy cats.
posted by Mitheral at 7:23 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

This sounds an awful lot like a business building its own infrastructure and employing actual humans to provide a service. Clearly this space is ripe for further DISRUPTION.

Check it:

An app where people can bid on what they'd pay for gas, per gallon, that will alert other users willing to sell at that level when they are close so they can connect. The one selling the gas can then syphon fuel out of their own tank and exchange it with the buyer, paying through this app (with a modest service see of course).

I call it: Hosr
posted by Reyturner at 7:25 AM on May 19, 2015 [43 favorites]

I propose Pluggr: a service featuring a person who will drive out to your house and plug in your e-car's battery for you, because sometimes you're just too tired to do that.
posted by chavenet at 7:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

The market is an idiot. Let's decide through democratic decision making processes instead.

You want to run business plans past local government before they're allowed to start up?

How much does your business plan have to change before it has to be re-certificated?
posted by Leon at 7:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

"Let the market decide" only works (and by "works" I mean something along the lines of "maximizes utility") when everybody has more-or-less the same income/wealth.

Well, with the proviso that under market rules, money tends to flow downward toward where money is already pooled, resulting in precisely the income distribution under which the market becomes hostile to human life.

I have no particular beef with this service aside from my generalized beef with cars. Even so, simply because of where they're starting operations, I would not mind at all if the awesome power of the state descended upon them as heavily as possible should they neglect to follow so much as one environmental or worker safety regulation. If their strategy is the typical Silicon Valley "it's better to ask forgiveness instead of permission" nonsense, they need to be broken as thoroughly as possible as an example to all the other disruptors out there.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 7:27 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

The startup world seems to have just given up, trying to claim it's making the world a better place. It's all about skimming premium fees now.

BTW, Uber pushing fees to 30% now for some services.
posted by fatbird at 7:27 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

When the warning light on the dash popped on to indicate I was out of gas, and I realized I had to reroute and delay by at least 15 minutes to fill up.

On my Forester when the gas light comes on there's still 8-10 litres in the tank, good for at least another 80kms of highway travel (not that I would want to really test that), and I assume it's the same for other vehicles. It's designed to give you a fair bit of a buffer; unless you're driving across the western desert of Australia, or Nevada, usually not a reason for immediate panic.
posted by Flashman at 7:29 AM on May 19, 2015

I don't think this is a particularly vile idea.

Luckily for the founders they don't have to pitch to the Metafilter commetariat for funding!

For the people snarking, consider that this service:

- Saves on time for all of its customers (and its customers are potentially anyone with a car, hardly a marker of elite class status in America)
- Removes a lot of car trips to the gas station, thus removing carbon emissions from the air
- Provides jobs for the people driving the trucks

Are those things you agree with or disagree with?
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:32 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The thing about the market being an idiot is that we're idiots too, which is why we have nice things like regulations and taxes, where we temper the various idiocies with longer-term balances. Where we set ourselves out to be smarter than the market to the extent that we don't trust the market at all, things don't work out well. Neither do they when we abdicate all responsibilities to the market.

It's a balancing act. In a case like this, assuming that the safety and environmental environment is sufficiently engineered to prevent social harm, why not see if people want the service and it can be provided at reasonable cost? It creates employment and it may reduce inefficiencies (if the delivery system were electric, then it would cut down on hydrocarbon use because people wouldn't be going out of their way to drive to gas stations) and these are not bad things. If there are problems that outweigh the benefits, then yes, take action, but I'm not smart enough to predict what will happen and, in general, I'm more minded to suck it and see than say "nothing shall be done for the first time".

The 'this only benefits the rich' issue has the flip side that it removes money from the rich and puts it in circulation - I'm no fan of trickle-down, quite the opposite, but one of the inefficiencies of inequality is that it removes large amounts of liquidity from the economy. By all means encourage innovations that benefit the poor, and do so with vigour, generosity, humanity and imagination, but I don't see you get more of those by banning other things. I'm all for making life more expensive for those with more money, and if it's politically impossible at the moment to do this by direct taxation then the closest you can get to progressive indirect taxation is by encouraging the bloated leeches to disgorge more voluntarily on stuff.

I'm still up for the anarcho-syndicalist utopia, mind.
posted by Devonian at 7:32 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

When the warning light on the dash popped on to indicate I was out of gas, and I realized I had to reroute and delay by at least 15 minutes to fill up.

Maybe don't wait until the light comes on before you decide to fill up?
posted by spinturtle at 7:34 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

How far can you go after the gas light in your car comes on?
posted by jeribus at 7:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is kind of up there with laundry in "stuff I don't really hate doing but is seriously inconvenient when it needs doing on precisely the day I have zero time", so this is not the most shocking idea, to me. Obviously, I think there need to be safety regulations, but it's not like Uber which is replacing a virtually identical service. I've worked tax seasons where the idea of going out to my car after work to find it full of gas would have felt like a miracle. Of course I can do it myself. I'm likely to continue doing so. But I've been in a position where giving somebody $7, even more than that to sleep in another half hour in the morning would have meant the world to me. Of course, I'll be happier when I can just plug my car in at night like I do my phone, but.
posted by Sequence at 7:36 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

If you don't drive until the light comes on but constantly top-up, you're ferrying a bunch of fuel around to no purpose. The most efficient way to fuel a car would be to have no fuel tank at all but receive just as much fuel as you needed moment by moment: this is, of course, impossible (or at least wildly impracticable), but the cost of tankering unused fuel from filling station to filling station has to be part of the equation.
posted by Devonian at 7:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

business is "booming" ... eh?
posted by TheLittlePrince at 7:42 AM on May 19, 2015

You seem to be awful certain that this is a net carbon emission savings for this service Noisy Pink Bubbles which is probably not even remotely the case.

Think about it unless you are driving something akin to a Hummer or Suburban you are almost certainly getting vastly superior gas mileage than a tanker truck or small refueling vehicle.

Not to mention you know all the time that they'll have to idle in traffic and stuff like that.

It's far less efficient than the centralized fueling facility model which is captured by the 7 dollars a tank upcharge. If is was more efficient than fueling stations it would be a service Exxon and company would already offer.

The implication is that no it's not more efficient by any means but it rather a service offered to people with more money than time. This is not even neccesarily a bad thing because we all pay other people to do tasks that we don't have the time or desire to do for ourselves but let's not pretend this is by some means a great innovation. It's a potentially disruptive economic transaction for a small number of Americans on the upper end of the socio-economic strata not some revolutionary new innovation. Yet it will no doubt get fuck tons of Venture Capital because that's what these sort of companies are good at doing: offering convenience for a "reasonable" markup.
posted by vuron at 7:42 AM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]

Removes a lot of car trips to the gas station, thus removing carbon emissions from the air

Do people make dedicated trips to the gas station? I've seen the studies that stuff like grocery delivery is actually better carbon-wise, but part of that is because you're reducing the number of trips private vehicles are taking. I don't see a stop at the gas station as a similar activity, since I feel like (and I have no data to back this up) going to the gas station is something you do on the way to something else, with a minimal detour. So, I don't see this as being as carbon reducing as something like Peapod.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:45 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

Cars, man... WHY?
posted by entropicamericana at 7:55 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Needs more drones.
posted by Lyme Drop at 7:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yes, people make dedicated trips to the gas station. And yes there are days when the thought of having to go out and get gas is just depressing--usually those come after already having spent more than five hours in the car commuting or when the weather is absolutely miserable, or when you hear news reports that suddenly the price of gas is going to skyrocket overnight. It is like any other chore. While you can usually schedule and plan for it, sometimes it just needs to be done and needs to be done now.
posted by sardonyx at 7:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

his is an extremely common service on industrial and large construction sites. Guys drive around on a schedule delivering fuel to trucks, equipment, generators

But in those cases the environmental permits sharply curtail where you can fill up -- distance to water, etc. I hope this business is at least as strictly controlled.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:57 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Drones.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 7:58 AM on May 19, 2015

Do people make dedicated trips to the gas station?

Not generally, but there are some people who do this. Either because there isn't a gas station convient to their normal route, or because they are weird or something.
posted by Foosnark at 7:58 AM on May 19, 2015

Damn you Lyme Drop
posted by Salvor Hardin at 7:58 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Foosnark, being "weird" has nothing to do with it. It's called life. Plans change, and sometimes the only way to cope with that is to make a dedicated gas run.

That said, I can't see myself using a service like that because I'm cheap I'm not paying extra to fill up my tank. I also have concerns about many of the issues mentioned above including environmental emissions and spillage and road damage and congestion, as I don't believe regulatory bodies can or will move quickly enough to ensure problems don't happen.
posted by sardonyx at 8:02 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Or, if possible, use public transportation. That way, instead of burning gasoline to get the tanker to your house, and burning gasoline to get your car and fifty others to Taco Bell, you only burn the gasoline to get one bus with fifty people on it to Taco Bell. Or, since you are paying to have gasoline brought to your house, you must be planning on going somewhere, right? So, on the way, stop at the gas station. Or, put Taco Bell on the back of an enormous flat bed truck and have Taco Bell brought to your house. Or, convince Taco Bell to start renting apartments on premise and you can live at Taco Bell. There are many ways we could do this, people! Just use your imagination! Have Taco Bell deliver food-like substances with drones, or have drones drop cans of gasoline from the sky. Going to work? Revive the concept from the beginning of the industrial revolution wherein manufacturers built cities for the workers to live in. That way, it's only a short walke or bicycle ride to get to work.

Having tanker trucks full of gasoline drive to your house seems like the most inelegant solution. Might as well just have underground pipelines of gasoline go to each house. Or better yet, have pipelines of liquid food-slurry connected to each house.

Me feels that all of these new-fangled "just in time" solutions are boneheaded and inefficient, designed to stroke the egos of hipster wannabes.
posted by rankfreudlite at 8:02 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

"A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality." - Gareth Hardin
posted by mhoye at 8:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

you only burn the gasoline to get one bus with fifty people on it to Taco Bell

... I really did consider trying to get this morning's bus driver to just stop and wait at Taco Bell while we all got AM Crunchwraps, but I figured even if I were successful (unlikely) the Taco Bell staff wouldn't thank me for putting that many people in line all at once.
posted by asperity at 8:09 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

You seem to be awful certain that this is a net carbon emission savings for this service Noisy Pink Bubbles which is probably not even remotely the case.

I concede it could go either way, depending on a number of factors (existing gas station visit patterns and how those would change, miles driven in gas efficient cars vs a gas-inefficient delivery truck, traffic congestion, etc.), but I think either of us would be lying if we said we knew for sure which way it would go. There would need to be some kind of quantitative analysis to back a claim up. At least the potential is there.

This service is, at present, a relatively small scale experiment. The calculation might also change if it ever scaled up to service a large number of people, or expanded business outside of suburbia, etc.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 8:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

But it is the incidentals that I like! Will these tanker trucks provide me with my lottery tickets, my assorted bad tastes in gummy candy or the impulse buy of pork rinds? Really, a gas station is not just about gas.
posted by jadepearl at 8:14 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I don't get the "filling stations are in sketchy neighborhoods" thing, but maybe it's because I live in a city of only a million or two in the mid-south-West, where we don't have any really sketchy neighborhoods, and where we call them "gas stations."
posted by kozad at 8:15 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The 'this only benefits the rich' issue has the flip side that it removes money from the rich and puts it in circulation

This reasoning comes up a lot, but as far as I can tell it doesn't amount to much in practice. Really what will happen (if the business is successful) is that a small amount of money from a large amount of fairly well off people will slosh into a huge pool for a couple of now quite rich people. Most of the money just sloshes back and forth towards the top. I am surprised that you call yourself "no fan" of trickle down, when you seem to be advocating that it will work right here. It doesn't and it won't.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Let the Market decide.

This is something people say when they don't want to think too hard about the consequences of a given product or service. Like, should we really be boiling down kittens to make fuel for our delivery drones? Let the market decide!
posted by elwoodwiles at 8:22 AM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]

Replace the gas with charged batteries delivered to my electric car, where they are swapped out in seconds because they were so cleverly designed.

Design isn't the problem. Batteries are huge, and heavy.

Even the best batteries don't have anything close to the energy density of gasoline. Imagine having to swap out your entire gas tank while it's full. Now consider that the batteries for an electric car are going to need to be several times larger and heavier than your gas tank.

Tesla "solved" this problem by bolting a huge flat battery to the undercarriage of the car, but it's unlikely that this approach is particularly elegant or scalable, not to mention that you will need to factor the economics of battery wear into the swap.

At the end of the day, it might just be easier to upgrade the power grid.
posted by schmod at 8:24 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I agree that this feels like a Netflix move, where they're trying to get a customer base and infrastructure in place to deliver replacement batteries (which certainly would be safer and cheaper to transport). Or at least I hope so, because solving the issues with electric cars would be a good thing.

For $7 this is a bourgeois luxury, it's not Neronian decadence. (We're not talking about helicopter fuel.) The surcharge plus the gasoline markup probably come out to about a week's worth of Starbucks drinks. Or like the difference between buying a burrito and bringing your own lunch to work.

I don't know about the regulatory issues. It wouldn't shock me if fuel trucks are inadequately regulated right now, but they probably are okay -- although maybe the risk analysis is for much less frequent deliveries (like of heating oil mentioned above).

I assume there's not going to be a "FilldX", where instead of a fuel truck you get Joe Dirt in his 1994 Tacoma with a Pepsi bottle full of siphoned gasoline -- for only a $4 surcharge.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:27 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't get the "filling stations are in sketchy neighborhoods" thing

Same here, yeah there's gas stations in bad neighborhoods and gas stations in good neighborhoods. Gas stations in the city and gas stations in the suburbs and the exurbs. Is everyone having to drive to Crackton to get fuel all of a sudden? Yeah, this might be useful for those way out in rural areas, but there's no way in hell a Silicon Valley startup is setting up shop 250 miles from the nearest city. And if this thing catches on, couldn't AAA come in and crush this startup like a cockroach? So for that reason, I'm out.

However, I live in Houston, and we have a lot of gas stations.
posted by ALongDecember at 8:29 AM on May 19, 2015

Telecommuting and telepresence technology is still in its infancy.

Look around your office today. Inside of 20 years, half of those people will be working from home full-time. There will be a booming business in construction and interior design for people setting up snappy-looking home offices suitable for being on camera with all of their co-workers. Some people will even have green screens and photographic backdrops.

The roads will be empty.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:31 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

do they refill on the fly, like the way jet planes doo? That would be awesome. otherwise, meh.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 8:36 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

What I'm really waiting for is a service that will get a quadcopter to pilot a cheeseburger into my mouth on demand. I am constantly startled by the funny sensation that occurs roughly when the sun is setting (WHAT IS THIS??? HOW COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE PLANNED FOR THIS???) and cheeseburgers seem to make it go away.
posted by indubitable at 8:37 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

My new, actually environmentally-friendly service will be maximizing the efficiency of one's errands. Like, I'll build an app that asks where you live, and where you work, and will figure out which gas stations and grocery stores are closest or en route from one to the other, and when those gas stations and grocery stores are the emptiest. And it'll hook into your gas gauge and your fridge so you'll get a text message on Tuesday: leave 5 minutes early because you need to get gas at $station on the way to work! And maybe on Friday you'll get a message telling you that you better stop for beer at $store on the way home because you're running low.

I mean really. Combining trips to maximize fuel and time efficiencies is not rocket science.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

Cool Papa Bell: I'm old enough to remember the paperless office, too.
posted by Leon at 8:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

I would sign up for this service. I would also dig a swimming pool in my backyard and fill it with gasoline if the stupid local bylaws didn't prevent it.

Also, can I pay for a friend's hybrid car to *accidentally* get filled up with diesel?
posted by blue_beetle at 8:42 AM on May 19, 2015

it's not Neronian decadence

No, if I remember rightly Nero used to get his gas delivered by hand, actually in the palms of Persian virgins processing through the streets. They told him it was a fire hazard.
posted by Segundus at 8:43 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some of you - perhaps people without children? - seem to be unaware of the concept of "cognitive load". I'm no fan of this service, but the brain has limited bandwidth, and children can fill it up very quickly. Forgetting to plan ahead to fill up on gas is a completely understandable failing.
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

What I'm really waiting for is a service that will get a quadcopter to pilot a cheeseburger into my mouth on demand .

We have top men working on it right now: http://i.imgur.com/WM9ULdL.gif
posted by jjwiseman at 8:44 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

At the end of the day, it might just be easier to upgrade the power grid.

Or, you know, stop building around the automobile.

Also, if I never hear the "You must not have children because [self-serving defense of incredibly selfish, short-sighted, wasteful, and/or stupid behavior]" canard again, it will be too soon.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:48 AM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

... I really did consider trying to get this morning's bus driver to just stop and wait at Taco Bell while we all got AM Crunchwraps, but I figured even if I were successful (unlikely) the Taco Bell staff wouldn't thank me for putting that many people in line all at once.

I've actually been on more than one near-empty late-evening city bus where the driver has asked, "I'm running a bit early. Do you guys mind if I stop at Tim Hortons' and grab a coffee?"
posted by frimble at 8:49 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Maybe I missed it when I read about the company this morning, but how do they get the gas cap open if you aren't around? I mean, that's the point here right, that they can fill up your car while you're off doing something else? It seems kinda pointless if I have to leave my meeting, or dinner or whatever to go meet the guy so he can fill up my car.
posted by noneuclidean at 8:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

We were talking about this in the office a few weeks ago and one point came up (which I haven't seen in the thread): parking lots. This service would work well in a office lot where a bunch of employees bought in or the company pays the surcharge. The fuel truck just moves car to car (which is potentially where the supposed carbon reduction could come from). Alternatively, lots at malls or big box stores would work as well. "Shopping at xyz? Save $2 on the fill up!" They could always diversify and deliver coal to those drivers who prefer to roll that way as well.

And just to boost my cred, I hate automobiles with a passion and refer to them as weapons of mass destruction.
posted by bonje at 8:56 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]

> it would be ideal if someone could come gas up the car and then wash it and detail it while I was at wor

I had an idea for a company that I will never start but someone should (or possibly already has). It would involve going to clients' houses to detail minivans of families with small children. Get all the spilled snacks and drinks and crud out, clean the carseats and reinstall them properly, throw away all the broken plastic toys that fell out of goody bags and were promptly forgotten about, peel the stickers off the windows, put the CDs and DVDs back in their cases, steam-clean the travel mug, suck the sticky layer out of the cup holders...

Minivans need cleaning more than any other cars, but you can't take them to a place that would clean them because then what would you do with your kids while the car's being cleaned?

A fortune waiting to be made, I tell you. Please think of me when you're handing out your first round of bonuses.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

but what if I want artisanal gasoline refined locally with intention... is there a service for me?
posted by ennui.bz at 9:07 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Notice a disconnect between the original inspiration and the final result:

He was running out of gas while driving, and wished that he could get a "mid-air refueling". Problem that this solves: It's sometimes hard to plan ahead.

The service he created requires you to have your car at the agreed-to place, gas cap unlocked, at the agreed-to time. Problem this creates: It requires a lot of planning ahead.
posted by clawsoon at 9:08 AM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

If you don't drive until the light comes on but constantly top-up, you're ferrying a bunch of fuel around to no purpose.

Gasoline weighs about 6 pounds per gallon. According to some crunched numbers about total car weight vs. MPG, the general tendency is for 1 pound of weight (across a variety of cars, not necessarily varying the load on a single car) to reduce MPG by about 0.0052. Carrying ten gallons of fuel according tot hat math would reduce your MPG by 0.3.

Another website says carrying 100 pounds reduces MPG by about about 1%. 10 gallons of fuel in a typical new passenger car (35 MPG) would be a 0.216 reduction in MPG.

Unless you're a hypermiler I really wouldn't worry about it.
posted by Foosnark at 9:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Another website says carrying 100 pounds reduces MPG by about about 1%.

This implies a vehicle that weighs 10,000 lbs. So, not a typical passenger vehicle, and all sorts of simplifying assumptions like traveling in a straight line in a vacuum on a frictionless surface.
posted by indubitable at 9:28 AM on May 19, 2015

I mean really. Combining trips to maximize fuel and time efficiencies is not rocket science.

No, rocket science is dominated by the closed-form rocket equation and many-body interactions that are surprisingly amenable to naive approximations. What you're talking about it is actually NP-hard.
posted by WCWedin at 9:31 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]

Also, can I pay for a friend's hybrid car to *accidentally* get filled up with diesel?

Accidental (and "accidental") deliveries are totally going to be one of the failure modes.

In fact, this already is a failure mode for heating oil deliveries -- wrong-address deliveries. It can become a huge issue when people remove their AST to switch to a natural gas furnace, but don't remove the oil fill port. Several years later, some delivery guy goes to the wrong address, finds a heating oil fill port, and pumps 200 gallons of fuel oil directly to their basement floor. Huge mess, and expensive to clean up.

House misdeliveries happen WAY more often than you would think, given that it's pretty rare for houses to have an oil fill port but no oil tank. I can only imagine the shenanigans that will be faced when the delivery guys have to select the right car or truck. And I'm glad my car's gas cap locks from the inside.
posted by pie ninja at 9:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

I've actually been on more than one near-empty late-evening city bus where the driver has asked, "I'm running a bit early. Do you guys mind if I stop at Tim Hortons' and grab a coffee?"

I have been on a few of those too, where passengers got off, we all lined up, and the driver waited for us. I think this is a sign that I live in a more civilized nation.

This seems like such a niche service, it requires such a specific neighbourhood that I'm not sure the economics would work out on anything resembling a national scale. Or at least it would require a lot of local market research. I don't see how you could slap an app together and have it not be a giant flaming disaster.

The neighbourhood I live in currently, for example, would be a terrible place to roll it out. It is a forest of apartment buildings that be challenging to work around -- getting into and out of parkades -- and even if the truck could make it the building managers would likely say shove off you hoser (I can't imagine the building insurance covers fuel trucks). Adding insult to injury my neighbourhood has a decent amount of gas stations on all the major arteries in and out, I have literally never made a special journey to get gas, it is maybe 5 min out of my morning commute to get gas at the gas station a block from my apartment.

However the one thing my neighbourhood has going for it that the suburbs don't is a lot of potential customers in a short driving distance. Out in the 'burbs you would need a high amount of buy in to justify the long routes driving around to all the customers. That's where I think it would be challenging.

I think, as others have pointed out, that the one place where this does make sense is in the endless tracts of business parks that most car-centric cities have. You have large parking lots full of cars, easy to get at, and the potential for fleet buy-in and other things.
posted by selenized at 9:44 AM on May 19, 2015

flashman: On my Forester when the gas light comes on there's still 8-10 litres in the tank, good for at least another 80kms of highway travel (not that I would want to really test that), and I assume it's the same for other vehicles. It's designed to give you a fair bit of a buffer; unless you're driving across the western desert of Australia, or Nevada, usually not a reason for immediate panic.

Manhattan is an interesting beast, so to speak. Gas stations are not all that easy to find in this city and they're not always marked by large, visible signs. Unless you know where they are, it's easy to wind up driving around a bit to find one. Assuming the gas station you're looking for hasn't closed for the night or is just plain closed down, which happened to me once when I was running on empty and searching for a station downtown. Couple this with frequent bumper to bumper traffic during rush hour and on some weekends (where you could easily be stuck for a while trying to get anywhere, and it can be a bit nerve-wracking for a driver. It's easy to say, "well, my car has 10 miles left when the light goes on, so I'm good" but what does that mean in terms of time idling in stop-and-go traffic? What happens if you're stuck for 30-45 minutes? How does that impact your fuel reserves? Older or larger cars probably won't last as long in that situation as newer ones. Should you turn the car off and on? Lots of questions arise. Even if you really do have more than enough gas in the tank to get you where you need to go, that light can be enough to make a person worry.

I bet many people who live outside the city in NJ or the boroughs do what I do and try only to fill up outside of Manhattan -- where it'll be easy to find a service station and a hell of a lot cheaper. Those folks may not know where to head if they run low in Manhattan. So that might also compound the worry.

spinturtle: Maybe don't wait until the light comes on before you decide to fill up?

Well, yeah. Obviously. But when you're poor and/or on a budget, sometimes filling up past a quarter of a tank at a time is challenging -- especially if your car is old and guzzles gas like it's liquid gold. Been there, done that, etc.
posted by zarq at 9:45 AM on May 19, 2015

I call it: Hosr

Sounds like it could really take off.
posted by A dead Quaker at 9:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [20 favorites]

And silicon valley once again tackles the difficult question of "how can we make it easier to be rich tech company employees?" DISRUPTING GAS STATIONS, BABY.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

> The market is an idiot. Let's decide through democratic decision making processes instead.

Yeah! The market's an idiot! Let's go with the wisdom of the electorate! I don't see how this could go wrong!
posted by Sunburnt at 9:54 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

> Combining trips to maximize fuel and time efficiencies is not rocket science.

Yeah, but the app will work differently.

You'll put in the points you need to visit to complete your list of errands.

It will combine your trips to route you past the places that have bid highest for your attention, while bombarding your phone and car audio system with ads telling you TURN LEFT AND STOP HERE FOR BARGAINS NOW

Meanwhile the gasoline tanker idling on your block while filling your rich neighbor's cars gets, oh, a little leak because the brat kid with his 30.06 takes a potshot at it, and

INCREASE YOUR FIRE INSURANCE COVERAGE NOW? CLICK OR SAY YES ...
posted by hank at 9:58 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The market is an idiot. Let's decide through democratic decision making processes instead.

The market is a democratic decision-making process, it's just distributed instead of centralized. Any top-down process, whether it's direct democracy, representative democracy, aristocratic oligarchy, or totalitarian dictatorship, will not have the time or knowledge to adequately decide the huge number of allocation questions that the market decides every day. Imagine requiring a voting process before anyone could start a business!*

And that's still not considering that starting a business ought to be a right on par with free speech; if I have a good or service and want to ask for money in exchange, I'm free to do so. There's no fundamental difference between a gasoline vendor and a lemonade stand.

Exceptions include monopolies, which can ignore the market's price mechanism, and externalities (like gasoline's obvious harm to the environment), which don't get counted in the price. For those, we already have sufficient democratic controls, e.g. trust-busting laws and environmental protection regulations. If a new business is violating those regulations they can be shut down, but no authority needs to be consulted to grant them the right to exist.

On preview, what Sunburnt implied.

* Francis Spufford's Red Plenty describes how some Soviet computer scientists ended up basically duplicating the free market as a computer simulation of "shadow prices" for the central planners to use when allocating goods. For various reasons, this cybernetic approach didn't take off there, but Chile was more enthusiastic about its Project Cybersyn, which had some success before the CIA-backed coup.
posted by Rangi at 10:04 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Only if it can refuel me while I'm driving 120km/hr.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2015

What I'm really waiting for is a service that will get a quadcopter to pilot a cheeseburger into my mouth on demand.

I'm kind of wary of robots trying to feed humans. Charlie Chaplin knows that can be dangerous.
posted by Rangi at 10:07 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

This would be a wonderful idea in a limited sort of situation. I recall almost 10 years ago when, shortly after Katrina, hurricane Rita pointed her bad self at Houston. It seemed like half the population decided to get the hell out of town. In the 100-mile-long backups people were running out of gas. The stations, if you could get to them, were dry as well. The gas trucks were stuck in the same traffic. People were suffering and even dying in their cars in the heat. A fill-up truck service would have been very welcome by the people in those lines, with the price not an object.

As long as we can keep ~~Oilr~~ ~~Instagas~~ Filld from introducing surge pricing during natural disasters, we're set.
posted by duffell at 10:16 AM on May 19, 2015

["Let the market decide"] is something people say when they don't want to think too hard about the consequences of a given product or service.

And they're right to do so. Look around a grocery store, or 7-11, or CVS, or Target, and try to imagine the consequences of every product on the shelves. Should they be for sale? At what price? How many should we manufacture? You simply don't have the necessary information, and even if your community got together and voted you still wouldn't. With a globalized economy, every person in the world would have to contribute their perspective to get a good overall picture, and there's no way for democratic voting (or centralized representative-picking, or ultra-centralized dictatorship) to efficiently do that. By the time you got done voting on the prices of flip phones, smart phones would already have replaced them.

A market bypasses all this by letting consumers "vote" with their money, and trusts producers to take effective demand into account when producing. (Which they do: there are no square-wheeled cars on the market because producers know nobody would buy them.)

This process does fail when effective demand doesn't match actual demand—i.e. when some people want to buy things but have no money—and democracies do try to take care of that with welfare programs, progressive taxes, (theoretically) basic income, and so on. I'm all in favor of that, but it's very different from trying to replace the free market—more like enabling poor people to participate in the free market. (It's telling that one of the most effective charities, GiveDirectly, doesn't make decisions about what the poor need, but sends them cash and lets them decide how to spend it.)
posted by Rangi at 10:21 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wonder if 200-300 years from now kids will be taught in school that in Old American English, when you encounter a word that's pretty much a normal-looking Old American English word, but its ultimate vowel has been dropped, then that word refers to something tech-related. It's like an anti-suffix that indicates a pretty specific thing (or context, anyway). I roll my eyes every time I see a new business name like "Filld." While I kinda hate the tweeness of it, and hate what they're doing to perfectly good words, at the same time I feel like I'm watching a linguistic milestone develop or something.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [11 favorites]

I'm sure they're following all the applicable regulations about transporting hazardous cargo, including driver certification and insurance, right? And all the environmental protections about dispensing gasoline, like vapor recapture?

Wouldn't it be more respectful to let the individual gas-sharers solve these issues in their individually preferred manner?

I mean, the market totally takes care of all other employment-related issues for Uber, right?
posted by Dashy at 10:47 AM on May 19, 2015

> The market is a democratic decision-making process,

If you're willing to use "democratic" for a system where 1% of the population gets 90% of the votes, then I suppose it is...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

This process does fail when effective demand doesn't match actual demand—i.e. when some people want to buy things but have no money—and democracies do try to take care of that with welfare programs, progressive taxes, (theoretically) basic income, and so on. I'm all in favor of that, but it's very different from trying to replace the free market—more like enabling poor people to participate in the free market.

Seriously though, the first clause of this statement is basically "this process does fail when it works as designed." Market capitalism has a baked-in tendency toward the centralization of effective demand in very few hands, because that's how allocation by markets work — under market rule, the chief resource required to make money is money, and so money by its own volition seeks out a situation where it's held by the smallest possible number of oligarchs.

I am wholeheartedly in favor of social democratic reforms aimed at thwarting this tendency — welfare programs, progressive taxes, basic income, a Tobin tax, whatever, because I hold that the sort of relatively comfortable people who grow up in relatively egalitarian social democracies are actually more likely to organize effectively than people who are desperate and starving. However, I don't have any hope of these reforms getting put in place barring some sort of revolutionary awakening, because in the aftermath of the 1960s capital realized that if there are too many comfortable educated people in a country, they can become a threat. As a response to the tendency for a broad base of relatively comfortable, well-educated people to oppose a system that keeps them more or less voiceless and others more or less down, capital launched the successful Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution in the 1980s. This put in place a set of rules — rules that have, for whatever it's worth, reached their apotheosis in the form of Silicon Valley market fundamentalism — that forecloses social democratic reforms in the interest of keeping us too desperate and tired and scared and undereducated to threaten capital.

This Filld thing. I don't know what to say about it other than it's yet another stupid luxury that's not worth it out of the Silicon Valley machine for cranking out stupid luxuries that aren't worth it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:07 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Out in the 'burbs it ain't at all weird to have things dropped off/serviced at your house. There's a big green truck that delivers ice-cream you pre-ordered, white truck vendors selling frozen meat, various personal vehicles from delivery joints, fresh groceries and this big brown truck that delivers tons of crap from these guys. Hell, in this town one can get both weed and cookies and milk delivered fresh.

It's like gas is about the only thing that doesn't deliv'r.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Most drivers I know are willing to drive across town to the station that's 5 cents a gallon cheaper rather than overpay for their gas. At a $7 charge, your gas is going to have to be 35 cents a gallon cheaper (on a 20 gallon tank, which is larger than my car) to break even. Alternatively, I'd have to burn over two gallons of gas driving around looking for a station before that becomes economically sensible (assuming gas costs about a buck more per gallon in CA than in MA, which actually seems reasonable).
posted by maryr at 11:20 AM on May 19, 2015

Anyway, please donate to my Kickstarter to buy Silicon Valley some goddamned E's.

(I plan on buying surplus lower case E's from turn of the century failed startups. As a bonus for early adopters, we'll use the lowercase I's as exclaimation points.)
posted by maryr at 11:22 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

Notice a disconnect between the original inspiration and the final result:

This can be one of life's major pit-falls. You wake up early to do a load of laundry, then two hours later, you find yourself prostrate on the couch with your face covered with Cheetos dust, and laundry undone.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:23 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

The market is a democratic decision-making process, it's just distributed instead of centralized. Any top-down process, whether it's direct democracy, representative democracy, aristocratic oligarchy, or totalitarian dictatorship, will not have the time or knowledge to adequately decide the huge number of allocation questions that the market decides every day.

Unfortunately, the market is in practice itself a top-down system, because of the strong tendency for money to seek money. Even if we were to throw a one-shot Jubilee and evenly distribute all the money in the world — thereby making a temporary bottom-up market democracy — the market would, barring continual redistributive state intervention, quickly fall back into a condition wherein democracy crumbles and oligarchy rises. In practice, markets operate, insofar as they do operate, not through better coordinating the needs of the various participants, but by wholesale ignoring information about the needs of most participants in favor of the signals representing the desires of a few.

I admit to having a huge crush on Allende's Cybersyn system, even though I know intellectually that it's nearly as exploitable as market capitalism is. Frankly, my dream country is something like the Soviet Union in its fading days: an economic system wherein nobody has much, nobody starves much, nobody works much, and everybody sits around and talks a lot.¹ This likely explains why my reaction to Spufford's presentation of Khrushchev-era Soviet cybernetics in Red Plenty was less "oh that is so horrible and wasteful" and more "well, even this totally flawed implementation is less awful than the nonsense that the market comes up with."

[1]: Sort of like if Metafilter were a nation-state, I guess.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:25 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

The market is an idiot. Let's decide through democratic decision making processes instead.

What, like democracy is not just as much of an idiot as the market?

Our systems are all stupid and broken. It's a good thing to keep them in tension with each other, because that gives us free space in between where we can ignore them and get on with our lives in peace.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:37 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'd rather they come to my commuter parking lot and do an oil change. I don't have the hour or two needed for a quality oil change. (Sorry Jiffylubitorium)
posted by Gungho at 11:38 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Out in the 'burbs it ain't at all weird to have things dropped off/serviced at your house. There's a big green truck that delivers ice-cream you pre-ordered, white truck vendors selling frozen meat, various personal vehicles from delivery joints, fresh groceries and this big brown truck that delivers tons of crap from these guys. Hell, in this town one can get both weed and cookies and milk delivered fresh.
It's like gas is about the only thing that doesn't deliv'r.

That's because it enables you to do the thing that you were trying to avoid in the first place.
posted by rankfreudlite at 11:46 AM on May 19, 2015

What, like democracy is not just as much of an idiot as the market?

Correct. Democratic decision making processes are on the whole smarter than, and yield better results than, market-driven decision making processes.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:48 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

> Look around your office today. Inside of 20 years, half of those people will be working from home full-time. There will be a booming business in construction and interior design for people setting up snappy-looking home offices suitable for being on camera with all of their co-workers. Some people will even have green screens and photographic backdrops.

You realize that this only works for office jobs, right?

Let's take a look at the employment breakdown by sector in the US.

All the "goods producing jobs" are immediately not an option, as with the overwhelming majority of healthcare. "Information" and "professional services" seem to be the likely jobs for telecommute, as well as potentially some financial -- but not likely very many, because of the difficulty of regulatory compliance for telecommute environments.

So maybe 15% of jobs could go tele, assuming people are being INCREDIBLY adaptive. Adoption of this has been very slow -- I'm one of the lucky ones who found tele work, after searching for 4+ years, and only because I know someone -- and because I'm working as an independent contractor. Not that I'm complaining, but this is NOT what the majority of the country will be able to do.

Most of the "tele" jobs we are seeing today are still wanting people to live nearby and show up 2-3 days a week.

Yes, some of this can change in 20 years - within the sector where it is possible for it to change, which is by no means the majority.
posted by MysticMCJ at 11:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, on the "lol what people can't make good decisions ur crazy" tip, I hold that the fashionable contempt for democracy that you find Americans espousing in this sort of conversation is itself primarily a symptom of our rule by oligarchs.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: Our systems are all stupid and broken.
posted by duffell at 12:06 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Out in the 'burbs it ain't at all weird to have things dropped off/serviced at your house. There's a big green truck that delivers ice-cream you pre-ordered, white truck vendors selling frozen meat, various personal vehicles from delivery joints, fresh groceries and this big brown truck that delivers tons of crap from these guys. Hell, in this town one can get both weed and cookies and milk delivered fresh.

I had a "milkman" growing up in a rural-ish suburb that lasted until 1999 or so. It's weird they hit a point where they all vanished, and now are probably coming back again.
posted by ALongDecember at 12:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I had a "milkman" growing up in a rural-ish suburb that lasted until 1999 or so. It's weird they hit a point where they all vanished, and now are probably coming back again.

As much as I hate to repeat tired cliches; until a better explanation arrives, there is this:

"History does not repeat itself, it just rhymes."

--Mark Twain ( from my memory)
posted by rankfreudlite at 12:50 PM on May 19, 2015

Look around your office today. Inside of 20 years, half of those people will be working from home full-time

Funny, I first heard that 30 years ago.
posted by Fnarf at 12:53 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

How about Milkd, a service that brings milk (and cream, and butter, and eggs!) to your door. Perhaps in collaboration with a start-up supplying baked goods.

Ooooh! And diapers, too. Though we'd need separate bins, of course....

They could advertise their services in some sort of printed version of a website, also distributed curbside.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Rangi: This process does fail when effective demand doesn't match actual demand—i.e. when some people want to buy things but have no money

The market also has one very big failure mode which is always overlooked people who are content to let the market decide things.

If the market decides that home gasoline delivery is a good thing, it won't be thinking about what happens when many more tanker trucks are on the road making frequent deliveries to parked automobiles in residential driveways. The market won't care about the inevitable spills, environmental contamination, and pollution until long after the cleanup begins.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

A handcrafted print version of a website, full of lovingly curated stories?
posted by entropicamericana at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

It takes no contempt to observe that every system has limitations and that different tools are better suited for different jobs. The market tends to win at resource optimization and tends to fail at matters of justice / equity. Democracies tend to be less bad at fairness problems but fail toward inefficiency, and are susceptible to what one might call "busybody problems" or NIMBY issues.

Alternately, the market wins at resource concentration but tends to be wildly inefficient; this inefficiency is papered over by redefining inefficiencies as externalities and pawning them off on someone else, typically someone who lacks the effective demand to resist it. This is why, to take the smallest silliest possible example, it apparently makes sense under market rules to truck around gas in tankers so that the relatively well-off don't have to stop at gas stations.

If it were up to the carping commentariat on Metafilter it would be effectively illegal to start any new business, and I'm glad that decision is not entirely made by democratic processes, because we would miss out on a lot of opportunities for innovation and improvement of efficiency.

Control by the Metafilter commentariat (we prefer the term Central Commenting Committee, but we'll let it slide this time) is, it goes without saying, different from democratic control.
It's funny, this word "business." During the rise of mercantile capitalism in Europe, European languages were faced with the problem of describing the new type of person that had emerged, and the whatever-it-is that they were doing. Most languages took the route that English took; inventing a new word derived from terms describing frantic action, terms like "busy." As such, the people engaged in mercantile capitalism become known as the people who keep themselves busy, somehow, doing something that makes money, somehow — businessmen. Because capitalism was invented by and favors businessmen, the idea that keeping busy somehow doing something that makes money somehow is in itself a good became prevalent. I believe we have different ideas about the virtue of keeping busy making money; you think that it is in and of itself an expression of human greatness, I think that busy-ness is at best neutral, and more often bad, since modulo tight regulation it tends to involve packaging up inefficiencies as externalities and pawning them off on someone who can't avoid them. (the act of packaging up and pawning off externalities is referred to as "disruption" and "innovation.")
I admit it is really hard to make decisions that take into account the effects on everyone impacted by them. This is why market capitalism presents a façade of efficiency through denying a voice to most people living under it. This is also why I prefer systems, even really goofy ones like Cybersyn, that allocate resources based on non-transferrable votes rather than on transferrable dollars, because I fail to acknowledge that businessmen are more valuable than anyone else. I don't have any easy solution for the hard problem of democratic coordination, because it doesn't admit to easy solutions. All I can say is that perhaps if we weren't spending so much time and energy on business we could get down to the seriously hard work of democracy.
You seem satisfied with market capitalism, even though it is actively producing at least one apocalypse that this generation and the next will have to either deal with or die in. I suspect that this is because you (correct me if I'm misremembering who you are) have certain highly valued technical skills and connections that allow you to individually thrive under it. This is not indicative of your ability to skillfully worm your way into freedom by balancing systems against each other, and it is not something that most people can use to achieve freedom. It's simply a lucky privilege that you have been temporarily extended.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:24 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]

Dip Flash: "But in those cases the environmental permits sharply curtail where you can fill up -- distance to water, etc. I hope this business is at least as strictly controlled."

I don't think that is the case here in BC. At least from what I've observed. I mean the site I'm working at now is literally on the ocean; we have our own private dock facilities. All the stationary equipment has containment trays underneath but the gas guys fill up where ever the equipment happens to be located. Are there no tidy tanks in the back of work trucks in California?
posted by Mitheral at 1:26 PM on May 19, 2015

Maybe don't wait until the light comes on before you decide to fill up?

From your mouth to my wife's ears. Where she will ignore you the same way she ignores me, then ignores the low fuel light, then has to mad-scramble to find the closest station when the remaining distance display on the TDI says under 5 miles. Sometimes when we're going somewhere and I haven't necessarily allowed for an additional 15 minutes in our schedule because I had no idea the car needed fuel, which will piss me off so greatly that it will ruin the next hour or so of my day.

It is a minor foible of a woman I otherwise love very much and who is so much more together in every other aspect of life than I could ever be. But in order to reduce this tension I am often one of those people who is out making a dedicated trip to the station when I have a few spare minutes in the evening or want to get out of the house (which I have been working from all day) and using that "leisure" time to fill up a car I rarely drive.

So if this service existed here for a slightly more reasonable premium than about 18% of the cost of our fill-up, yeah, I would totally give it some consideration. It strikes me as fucking stupid, but I can see how some people might find it useful.

I'm sure they're following all the applicable regulations about transporting hazardous cargo, including driver certification and insurance, right?

That should be built-in to the running of a fuel transport truck. If it's possible to have one on the road without that cost built into it then that's a problem beyond some random entrepreneur clowns.
posted by phearlez at 1:43 PM on May 19, 2015

If it were up to the carping commentariat on Metafilter it would be effectively illegal to start any new business, and I'm glad that decision is not entirely made by democratic processes, because we would miss out on a lot of opportunities for innovation and improvement of efficiency.

But, but, who'll think of the corporations? /violins
posted by Lyme Drop at 1:44 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm grumpy today due to lack of sleep so I apologize in advance for sounding curt.

When I think of the failures of democracy the most damning example that comes to mind is the War on Drugs, a set of policies which were blatantly unreasonable from the beginning, have created or exacerbated structural injustices in our society, and should never have been under the control of any government in the first place, whether that government were one subject to democratic oversight or not. And yet, despite the extremely heavy-handed interference of a wide variety of democratically elected governments enjoying widespread popular support, the market has largely managed to solve this problem anyway and ensure that people who want to take drugs are generally able to acquire them. This is a good thing. If we had a sane democracy it could help out by regulating the market with rules about quality and labeling, but even with our democratic governments hurting rather than helping, market capitalism has done a pretty good job of allowing people to lead the lives they want to live.

Point #4 is a reasonable conclusion given what I've said so far in this thread but the truth is that I am no fan of market capitalism either. Yes, the system has treated me reasonably well and I am fortunate enough to enjoy a comfortable life, but the world around me is going to shit and the resources which allow me to live comfortably are completely inadequate for accomplishing anything significant toward stopping the global environmental catastrophe or the steady worsening of wealth inequality.

With global climate change we may easily see the colossal failure of market capitalism, but we must also admit that democracy has done no better. The wheels of power turn so slowly that it is now too late to forestall the disaster and all we can hope to do, should our democracies hurry up and get their act together any time in the next several decades, is to mitigate some of the worst effects.

My point is not "democracy sucks, let the market rule", my point is "all hierarchial power structures suck, let's be skeptical about all of them and try to find better ways of organizing ourselves". Democracy has been a spectacular failure, but so has everything else; we need to keep looking and inventing and developing, and not hold any one strategy up as the one true way of organizing our society. We can do better.
posted by Mars Saxman at 1:54 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I myself thought of a great idea for a service- people would drive to the customs house, and, get this, paint the house for them.

However, this discussion has pointed out the error in such an idea. Obviously, the correct method is to take the bike or bus to the central paint depot, choose the democratically selected paint color, and then carry all the materials back on the bike or bus yourself.
posted by happyroach at 1:56 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't think we've ever tried democracy anywhere yet, and I think it's high time we gave it a go. the Athenians maybe came the closest, but, well, given the restrictions on citizenship they were more of a bro-ocracy than a democracy.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:58 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

All of you people talking about the "spectacular failure" of democracy and markets really need to read more history. A least a third of the world's population - maybe half? - lives better than almost anyone lived for the ten thousand years before 1900 or so. Failures, yes. Spectacular failures? No.
posted by clawsoon at 2:09 PM on May 19, 2015

AugustWest: "This thing does not have to go to suburban homes."

Yeah, I can totally see this as convenient AND environmental if it visited, say, my husband's parking garage while he was at work. He has a long commute and stopping for gas does lengthen it (although there are several stations where he gets on and off the highway so it's not extreme lengthening). The nature of his job, a regional center in a more rural area, providing services to the entire region, means that a fair number of employees drive in from outlying areas and park in this garage, and have to fill up at least once per round trip. I could see the convenience of telling an app "Garage Name, Purple Level, Spot 56, License Plate HOTFLASH, fill 'er up." Or you check in with the lot attendant (it has an attendant!) on your way out of the garage and sign up for gas delivery that day. This garage has, in fact, already installed high-speed electric car chargers (and given those cars preferential spaces). No cost at present to the electric car drivers, just included in the regular garage fee.

I can't imagine this reaching the kind of critical mass in my not-super-dense neighborhood that would make it more environmentally friendly than just stopping at the gas station as necessary (which is not a huge hassle as there are many nearby and I'm not sure I've ever waited in a line at one).

(Actually, I am totally sure a parking garage in Chicago that advertised you could get oil changes at the garage twice a year (by scheduling in advance and paying $20, these models only, some restrictions apply ...) would make people feel better about paying Chicago's bandit parking rates ... at least their garage makes their life marginally more convenient!)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:22 PM on May 19, 2015

Luckily for the founders they don't have to pitch to the Metafilter commetariat for funding!

Hey! Coming this fall, on PBS:

Snark Tank!
posted by pjern at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

This is also why I prefer systems, even really goofy ones like Cybersyn, that allocate resources based on non-transferrable votes rather than on transferrable dollars, because I fail to acknowledge that businessmen are more valuable than anyone else.

My main issue with single non-transferable votes is not even that the voters are irrational (since alternative systems like markets or oligarchies are also irrational), but that one vote per person does not adequately express preferences. It would seem fair to me if gay people had stronger votes with regard to gay marriage, or cancer patients had stronger votes with regard to legalizing medical marijuana. This does not mean they're more valuable than other people, just that they have more of a stake in those issues and care more about them.

One possibility for avoiding the single vote's "tyranny of the majority" without being undemocratic is quadratic voting. Basically, votes are transferable, but at a quadratic instead of linear cost (there are reasons for choosing quadratic weighting in particular). It's only a proposal so far, so it could very well have worse failure modes than our current system, but it sounds promising in the linked paper. (And of course, even with single votes, first-past-the-post is a terrible system; some form of approval voting or range voting would have better outcomes.)
posted by Rangi at 2:50 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Mrs. Jeffamaphone would probably pay $7 to have her hands not smell like diesel because I failed to fill up the tank in our TDI and now she's on her way somewhere and the light came on. It seems impossible to use a diesel pump cleanly.

Do Mrs. Jeffamaphone a favor. About a nickel a piece. Or if that's beyond your budget, these are a penny a piece. A dollar's worth should last her a year.
posted by JackFlash at 2:55 PM on May 19, 2015

The only gas stations that I drive by on a regular basis are 20c or more higher than the ones I actually use (that's what I get for living next to the highway and working at the airport), so about half the time I fill it involves a dedicated trip. The rest of the time there is a few mile detour involved, which inevitably eats up 15 to 20 minutes.

That's not enough to make this service worth it, but I can see how that would be different for people who have less time, more money, or even more inconveniently located gas stations.

In the past, I always lived in places where I had reasonably priced gas stations directly on any route to anywhere I went, or a couple of blocks out of the way at most, so I would have been full of snark on the subject even a year ago and can understand how other people are at present.
posted by wierdo at 3:19 PM on May 19, 2015

This is what happens when Pete Campbell pitches to a client over dinner.
posted by 4ster at 3:35 PM on May 19, 2015

One possibility for avoiding the single vote's "tyranny of the majority" without being undemocratic is quadratic voting. Basically, votes are transferable, but at a quadratic instead of linear cost (there are reasons for choosing quadratic weighting in particular). It's only a proposal so far, so it could very well have worse failure modes than our current system, but it sounds promising in the linked paper. (And of course, even with single votes, first-past-the-post is a terrible system; some form of approval voting or range voting would have better outcomes.)

I liked your comment, especially since you referenced de Tocqueville. Nevertheless, how likely is it that we can get "our current system" to be logical?
posted by rankfreudlite at 3:41 PM on May 19, 2015

However, this discussion has pointed out the error in such an idea. Obviously, the correct method is to take the bike or bus to the central paint depot, choose the democratically selected paint color, and then carry all the materials back on the bike or bus yourself.

So I've been thinking about this analogy all day. I mean, it really does seem like this is a needlessly absurd process, especially compared to the process we have today, wherein we can just drive down to the hardware store, buy paint, brushes and rollers, and then either paint it ourselves or hire laborers to paint it for us.

But then I realized: I can't paint my house.

I mean, I would love to paint my house. Right now it's the drabbest, ugliest color you can imagine, but I can't repaint it.

This isn't because I don't have enough money to buy paint and hire laborers, or enough skill or time to paint it myself, or whatever. I can't paint my house because my lord — er, I mean, landlord — forbids it. About 60 percent of the people in my city live under the same conditions, wherein your cartoon vision of commies run amok would actually be freer than the actual situation, wherein we are not free to choose the color of the houses we live in, and wherein someone else, by dint of their superior market position, is free to paint what we call our homes whatever color they want without so much as asking us.

I mean, if I had to consult the people around me on whether or not I could paint my house a particular color, there would be a few constraints, but likely I'd be left with a fair amount of liberty — okay, sure, the people living a few houses down would prefer I not paint it anything garish, and the guys who stand on the corners on one side of the street would prefer I not paint it red, while the guys who stand on the corners on the other side would prefer I not paint it blue. Sounds good — maybe I would have went with bright blue diagonal stripes if I had free reign, but nevertheless I can work within the constraints imposed by the people around me. These constraints are considerably less tight than the constraints imposed by the guy out in Walnut Creek who I write rent checks to, who is only renting this house to me while he waits for the neighborhood to get "better" so he can Ellis Act me out, tear my — pardon, his — house down, and replace it with a mansion to rent out or sell to someone gentrified out of San Francisco.

And that's the deal: although we have this abstract ideal of democracy (one that we mock in practice, because we've been told we're all too stupid and weak to make decisions for ourselves), in concrete terms, because most of us are economically irrelevant, most of us not only don't have the freedom to paint our houses different colors, we can actually be dispossessed of what we think of as our homes more or less at the whim of our lords.

My city, likely the most democratic-spirited city in the entire country, has remarkably good tenant's rights laws compared to most other places in America. But even here I am not in any real way secure in my home unless I'm willing to mount a legal challenge against my landlord — which is foolhardy even if I have the resources required to win such a case, because most landlords are smart, know how to consult public records about landlord/tenant lawsuits before renting out a place, and refuse to rent to anyone who has ever attempted to assert their democratically established "rights."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:48 PM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

maryr: "Most drivers I know are willing to drive across town to the station that's 5 cents a gallon cheaper rather than overpay for their gas"

Most driver's don't account for neither wear and tear nor the cost of their time when making these decisions.
posted by Mitheral at 3:53 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I figured even if I were successful (unlikely) the Taco Bell staff wouldn't thank me for putting that many people in line all at once.

Derail: I worked at McDonald's in my younger days. We got the occasional school bus filled with kids on a band trip or whatever. Our policy was that the bus driver got a free meal for bringing in a big group of customers.
posted by Hatashran at 4:05 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

About 60 percent of the people in my city live under the same conditions, wherein your cartoon vision of commies run amok would actually be freer than the actual situation, wherein we are not free to choose the color of the houses we live in, and wherein someone else, by dint of their superior market position, is free to paint what we call our homes whatever color they want without so much as asking us.

Under an "abstract ideal of democracy," or an abstract ideal of communism, you are free to paint your own house. Ideal systems are nice that way.

In our actual world, as you say, 60% of people don't have houses to paint, and instead rent the use of a landlord's house, who probably won't let them repaint it. So here the ideal communism beats the inequality of actual democracy.

But actual communism turns out to be even worse than actual democracy. In the Soviet Union, "in cities right up to the 1970s, most families lived in a single room in a communal apartment, where they suffered from overcrowding and had little hope of improving their situation." Each apartment held two to seven families, and Khrushchev's plan decades later to fix the housing shortage with mass-produced apartments ended up creating more of the same. The inhabitants' concerns were less about what color to paint their walls, and more about dealing with drunk neighbors urinating through the door. They couldn't even avoid the inequalities of capitalism: "Beginning in the 1960s, people who could not count on joining the housing list because their present space exceeded the legal norm (i.e., they had more than five square meters per person) could contribute their personal funds to a cooperative construction project and receive what was called a "cooperative apartment." Only the better-off portion of the population could afford this, and here also the amount of living space a family already had could not exceed specific limits."

And sure, there's nothing about communism in theory that necessitates incompetent urban planning, or corrupt housing assignments, or mass housing shortages. But there's nothing about capitalism in theory that necessitates restrictive landlords, either. And the specific problems that we have between landlords and tenants seem fixable: pass some tenants' rights laws, change the culture so that painting the walls is as socially tolerated as changing the drapes, encourage people to buy their own houses (but be wary of the consequences). But before declaring the whole system of democratic capitalism to be not worth saving (you're not, You Can't Tip a Buick, but I know others who do), look at how previous attempts at an alternative turned out in practice.
posted by Rangi at 4:16 PM on May 19, 2015

Not to insist on terminology or whatever, but that "democratic capitalism" thing you're talking about is a contradiction in terms: there is no possible democratic capitalism, only a system wherein democracy and capitalism fight. I think that democracy can and should win that fight - but I'm so far gone on the pro-democracy side that I think we should select public officeholders by lot, like the Athenians did, and moreover I even think the Athenian mob was justified in killing Socrates (though to be fair I've stolen my argument for this from epic troll Bruno Latour).
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:03 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

because most landlords are smart

Citation desperately needed.

I mean, I take your point, they do seem possessed of a certain low cunning, I just couldn't resist
posted by hap_hazard at 5:08 PM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

a fair number of employees drive in from outlying areas and park in this garage, and have to fill up at least once per round trip

Am I misunderstanding you or are you really saying that people are using an entire tank of gas in a day, every day, going to work? Wow, that must really get expensive!
posted by saucysault at 5:31 PM on May 19, 2015

saucysault: "Am I misunderstanding you or are you really saying that people are using an entire tank of gas in a day, every day, going to work? Wow, that must really get expensive!"

He commutes 75 miles each way, or 150 miles round trip, every day. He carpools with two other guys, but we spend around $80/week on gas for his commute, he gets about 30 mpg. (I barely drive at all, I can go six weeks without going below a half tank.) It's our second-largest expense after housing. He also frequently has to do site visits all over the state, which can involve up to 600 miles round trip in a single day, although the state pays for that if he's visiting a site. I know it sounds like a lot -- and it IS a lot! -- but there are enough people who do it that there are several carpools going back and forth; his carpool has been as few as three and as many as five people (although one of the five was blind so couldn't take a turn driving), and we know around half a dozen carpools that go daily and maybe a dozen that go depending on seasonal requirements.

We've been trying to get his employer to agree to more telecommuting but it's going to be easier to actually move house (when he re-ups his contract and we're sure he's going to be working enough years to make the move worth it). It's ironic because we bought our current house to be 3 miles from his workplace and we barely used cars at all for several years, but, you know, wacky employment market, job 75 miles away.

We know a guy who does the same commute, every day, alone, in a classic mustang (I think?) that gets 12 mpg ... which runs to $187.50/week if gas is $3/gallon. Can't even imagine.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:08 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm so far gone on the pro-democracy side that I think we should select public officeholders by lot, like the Athenians did, and moreover I even think the Athenian mob was justified in killing Socrates (though to be fair I've stolen my argument for this from epic troll Bruno Latour).

I'd be interested to hear that argument! Does he present it in Socrates’ and Callicles’ Settlement—or the Invention of the Impossible Body Politic? I've just started reading that, but so far it's a fascinating deconstruction of the supposed opposition between democracy and reason, Might and Right:

Socrates accused Gorgias and then Polus of being the slaves of the people, or of being like Callicles, unable to utter other words than those the raging crowd puts in his mouth. But Callicles too, when his time to talk has come, accuses Socrates of being enslaved by the people of Athens and of forgetting what makes noble masters superior to the hoi polloi. Both protagonists rival each other in trying to avoid being branded with that fatal accusation: resembling the people, the common people, the menial manual people of Athens. As we will see, they soon disagree on how best to break the majority rule, but the goal of breaking the rule of the crowd remains beyond question.

... If you make a list of all the derogatory terms with which the common crowd is branded, it is hard to see which one of Callicles or Socrates, despises it most. Is it because assemblies are polluted by women, children and slaves that they deserve their spite? Is it because they are made up of people who work with their hands? Or is it because they switch opinions like babies and want to be spoiled and stuffed like irresponsible children? All of that, to be sure, but the source, for our two protagonists, of the greatest scandal is even more elementary than that: the great constitutive defect of the people is that there are simply too many of them.

posted by Rangi at 6:41 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

By "democratic capitalism" I'm referring to how most first-world nations, namely the United States, combine a democratic political system with a capitalist economy. They don't necessarily go together: China combines authoritarianism and capitalism (they may have been communist before, but by now it's in name only); Nazi Germany was authoritarian and fascist (putting aside its links with racism and genocide, economically it was meant to be a third position between capitalism and communism); ancient Greece was democratic and doesn't fit well in our modern economic classification.

Anyway, yes, to some extent democracy and capitalism conflict because the interests of those with political power (the voters) conflict with the interests of those with capital (rich voters). But that's true of any political-economic pairing. Some of the Soviet Union's problems can be blamed on conflict between communism (everyone's interests) and authoritarianism (Stalin's interests). Even democratic communism, which might seem to align the people's political and economic interests, would fail if groups of people want different things. (Could a democratic communist society containing Catholics and Protestants, or for that matter Vim and Emacs users, survive without splitting in half?)

(I might have to give democratic communism—basically anarcho-communism assuming that anarchy leads to stable democracy and not unstable feudalism—more consideration. But I can't imagine how an entire voting populace would contribute to the micromanaging decisions of an everyday economy, or what benefit it would provide for anyone. Surely the corporate board meetings of today's companies would not all have to be handled by mass polls! But if you limit those local decisions to the relevant parties, e.g. "the organization of the coal miners... will be in charge of the coal mines," then you're back to capitalism but with different corporate structure. Which actually sounds very promising; it's been observed before that large corporations, for all their association with extreme capitalism, are internally run more like authoritarian dictatorships.)
posted by Rangi at 7:08 PM on May 19, 2015

VCs! For $7/day I will drive around Menlo Park and deliver each of you a shiny new business idea that is hundreds of years old but has an app.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:27 PM on May 19, 2015

Right now, we have tanker trucks that fill up underground tanks at gas stations. My understanding is that leaks from those tanks cause a fair amount of ground contamination. In my area, former gas station sites sit for decades undeveloped due to the prohibitive cost of the clean-up. I don't see why avoiding the underground tank step is such a bad idea.
posted by parudox at 7:50 PM on May 19, 2015

because most landlords are smart.
Well sure, most landlords are smart, but is it the kind of smartness that benefits the tenant, or the smartness that benefits the landlord? Regarding that, is there a way to benefit both?
posted by rankfreudlite at 8:08 PM on May 19, 2015

I mean, if I had to consult the people around me on whether or not I could paint my house a particular color, there would be a few constraints, but likely I'd be left with a fair amount of liberty —

Obviously, you have NEVER dealt with a Home Owner's Association.

But actual communism turns out to be even worse than actual democracy.

HEY! No fair bringing actual communism into the picture! Around here we're only allowed to argue Ideal Communism vs. Actual Capitalism!
posted by happyroach at 11:41 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Isn't that pretty similar to the markup on having an attendant pump your gas today?

I haven't seen a full service gas station since...1979? I know they still exist in some places, but they aren't so common any more. This isn't really a useful comparison anyway - you still would have to drive to the full service station, and other services are included in that.
posted by MissySedai at 9:17 AM on May 20, 2015

There are still full service stations with attendants in New Jersey and I think Oregon but I haven't seen them elsewhere in thirty years.
posted by octothorpe at 9:30 AM on May 20, 2015

In Oregon there is no such thing as self-serve. State law requires an attendant to pump gas for you. I've lived here 8 years and this still annoys me when I'm sitting there waiting for someone to come take the nozzle out of my car.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:41 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I know at least three local full-serve stations - they tend to be independently owned places and the gas is usually pretty competitive. (They can't beat Cumby's.)

ETA: I am just north of Boston.
posted by maryr at 9:50 AM on May 20, 2015

This thread reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

"Why are there no self-serve gas stations in New Jersey? Fuck you, that's why."
I rue the day I told that to my niece. Now, every time anybody asks her a question . . .
posted by rankfreudlite at 10:29 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

How far can you go after the gas light in your car comes on?

That's a pretty useful site! From experience, I know that once the Prius complains that she's thirsty, we have about 80 miles left. We could push it to 100, but that's too close to "totally dry, electric motor is only gonna get you another 10 miles" territory. In our old car, we just gassed up at 1/4 tank, and never let the light come on.
posted by MissySedai at 10:41 AM on May 20, 2015

This is how propane is delivered in rural areas of the US. One truck and many stops along the way, although one stop for each house / property with a propane tank instead of a parking lot full of cars to be filled.
posted by krinklyfig at 8:28 PM on May 21, 2015

It's how my heating oil (which is really just diesel that doesn't have the gas tax applied (and a dye marker to indicate that fact)) comes; there's a handful of companies you contract with to get it delivered. They show up, drag a big-ass hose across the yard, and fill your storage tank. Some people have them in the basement, some are underground. Mine is just a big tank on the side of the house. A 1/4 inch copper tube come out of the bottom of it and it's gravity fed to my boiler on the other side of the house wall.

It's probably a good indicator about this sort of service. Despite not being subject to road taxes - and being a quantity buy as well - I still end up paying about the same for it as I would at the pump. And that's with delivery never needing to be more often than monthly, at most, allowing a lot of route optimization.
posted by phearlez at 9:10 AM on May 22, 2015

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Running on empty May 19, 2015 6:12 AM Subscribe

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Running on empty
May 19, 2015 6:12 AM Subscribe