On the 28 Februray the price of gas in the US was $1.044 per litre here in the UK the price was $2.04 per litre. In the US computers and other electronic goods are much less expensive than they are in the UK and in China the cost of a laptop is more or less the same price as the UK.

Does someone come around to your house to check and maintain the gas or electricity supply pipes and lines and where and with what frequency does such so-called maintenance take place?

Someone on this site in the US recently posted about the increase in gas prices. When I commented about the situation here nobody on site responded.

@ASTRALMAX Exactly. No, at best they do a shabby job of keeping the mains going, I suspect that there are huge profits being made out of price fixing. But if they were half as bad as the plastic payment card rip-off I would complain, people who take card payments, pay often as much as one and a half percent for each transaction, plus monthly rentals for the terminals, of thirty pounds or more, which itself would more than pay for the tiny factions of pence it costs to send payment messages round the wires. So that every card transaction effectively pays a tax which goes directly into a bank account on an offshore tax haven. People keep making more and more payments by card, instead of cash, and then wonder why the rich/poor divide keeps getting wider.