haha k, ldmom, when I think oil producers, refiners, independents, whatever, are out for more than themselves, THEN I'll put effort into them. It's hard for me to fathom why they haven't "explored" "discovered", etc., more fuel options with such a large amount of money available (you mentioned your H had $1B...and that's just one person)! But I suppose I really don't matter much to them, since gas is an inelastic good and therefore marginal increases and decreases in price will have virtually no impact on the demand curve. Then again, what do I know. I only have a "laughable understanding" of Econ, right? You add a lot of humor yourself by assuming things you have no idea about.
UCB compares their
rankings to Stanford, MIT, and CalTech, because they are all among the best schools in the world for engineering. In fact, in recent years, UCB undergrad engineering has been ranked higher than Stanford. That's TOTALLY different than "wanting"to be another school. As I mentioned earlier, Berkeley has more top-10 depts than Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. So I highly doubt they "want" to be someone else. Please only speak on what you know. You clearly aren't familiar with those two schools. As someone who has family on the faculty at both schools, let me say that they're extremely proud of who they are as
individual institutions.
And I'm sorry if I'm a disservice to you. But your oil company is a disservice to my state's pocketbook, so we're about even I think
Though I do admire your car swap...I've heard good things about the Prius. You'll have to let me know what you think about it
UNC: I think it already is in certain departments. But a lot of it depends on the success of other universities as well.