Link to referenced question: http://www.answerbag.com/a_view/3214912 *** NO POINTS FOR THIS ANSWER, PLEASE***

Welcome, The Chief. Nice article. I'm sure BigDaddy's told you all about AB and how to make this place great. Hopefully, you'll want to stick around and have some fun here with the rest of us asking/answering questions.

Hey The Chief, welcome to AB! Hope to see you around a lot. Thanks for the article, BigDaddy. Excellent! Congrats The Chief for a brilliant analysis. I really enjoyed reading it and quite agree with you.

If he's your friend, he must be good. Birds of the same feather flock together, right? ;) Welcome to Answerbag, The Chief!!!

Welcome to the Bag, Chief! Just scanned through your history. We have a lot in common! Great to have you here. <edit> Now that I know you're a fan of belly dancing I've posted a video, not for the faint of heart, to give you a proper belly dancing rum maiden welcome!

&lt;EDIT> Mistakenly posted comment.

I don't know if I've run into him yet, but I'd like to say welcome to The Chief and I hope he enjoys AB.

Welcomw Chief, hope you like it here as much as I do:)

Welcome to AB Chief!!! Hope you enjoy it here and stay a long while:)

Welcome to AB, Chief :). I hope you will come to love it here as much as I have. I agree completely with your article. I don't buy water, either. Nor do I buy women's clothing at 3 to 4 times what men get charged for theirs. I am not fooled into paying $15 for a pair of panties because they happen to be on a hanger intead of in a plastic bag with 5 more pairs just like them for half the cost. Nor do I pay 2 to 3 times the cost of a man's haircut without the frills. As it happens, I never pay retail on anything. And if I can't turn around and sell something for more than I paid for it, I don't buy it at all, minus food and paper products. I don't use credit cards and I haven't for at least 9 years. So you see, I am not a completely uneducated consumer. I refuse fall into the traps that the average American consumer does on a daily basis. The truth is, I don't know a hell of a lot about how everything intersects with everything else in our economy, but I do know hoodwinked when I see it. "Big corporations" use it as standard business practice every single day! Publix, Wal-Mart, Kroger....everyone of them have ridiculously marked up prices across the board with "high gas prices" as the whipping boy. Bullpucky! And what about these gas prices? Let's have another look at it, only this time, I will rely on your expertise to explain to me why the hell we are shipping nearly all of ours overseas to Asia, et al., when we should be building additional refineries HERE in the US to use our own oil, nearly completely alleviating our dependence on foreign oil entirely. It's not that I am mad with you. I'm just mad, period. I know that it is going to be the battle to end all battles to even get bio-fuels into the mainstream. It would be like curing all the ills of the world and putting the pharmaceuticals out of business. Auto makers won't change their engines without a fight of epic proportions. A fuel that allows us to go 70 miles per gallon?! Preposterous!! Oh, it's available already. But the mass market never hears of it, do they?. Why is that, do you think? Let me answer that - because keeping our consumers thinking that 33 miles per gallon is absolutely incredible means we don't have to tell them that we could be doing so much more. It will cost us millions, cutting into OUR bottom line. How do we explain that to the stockholders? Better not say anything to upset the status quo!