Gas shortage: Gov. Cooper declares state of emergency for NC
wlos.com
wlos.com
The correct solution for shortages is not to call upon a bunch of suckers to deprive themselves of basic goods, but to enforce rationing, by whatever means necessary.
That is, if the goal is to reduce the pain from the shortage. I'm sure people actually hate rationing and love feeling accomplished and resourceful as they screw their community out of supplies. So maybe calling upon suckers to be suckers is, in fact, the rational choice for governments as well.
That "me versus you all, me first you last" mentality IS totally rational in that context, but it is still detrimental to your community and you have to be comfortable making that choice.
My advice is to take enough not too much, there is a difference between hoarding and being supplied and it's pretty obvious when someone is hoarding.
Recognizing and accepting this fact is the first step towards fixing supply issues.
Money is not just an abstract store of wealth. It's a store of wealth backed by state violence.
Most revolts end up with poor people killing other poor people, or at "best", everybody killing everybody. When "money" (distinct from wealth) ceases to have the backing of state violence, it's replaced by private violence, backed by other forms of wealth.
People don't revolt because wealthy people can gas their cars. They revolt when they don't have what they need. Again using the above example, the vehicles of wealthy people simply don't represent a significant consumption of gas. It's not reasonable to talk of revolts or other such nonsense in this context.
No, money didn’t matter much. You could have money and still do nothing with it. You needed connections and an ability to kombinować (untranslable word, but somenthing akin to hustle or hack).
Not saying here that rationing is bad by itself (I think people would starve or revolt otherwise). But that your „full stop” is not always true.
Also, during mask shortages and toilet paper shortages last year, in no country I think, money would help you much. I could pay $1000 for N95 back then (literally), and wasn’t able to find one.
Oh oh, and remember that scene in Titanic where a rich guy offers a pile of money to get on a life boat? :,)
To scheme or connive feels about right to me haha. It's a tough word for sure.
* It's always been possible to buy a n95 mask at a $1k/mask price point in the US. I'm sure you never tried making that offer.
* My post was about wealth, and your reply switches this with "money," and then points out that sometimes money loses value. This is a straw man. If money has reduced value then it isn't necessarily indicative of wealth. When I talk about wealth it may be money in healthy, capitalist countries. In communist countries, wealth may take the form of political connections, of less measurable forms of power.
* The titanic scenario you propose, a zero-sum scramble for life, is not at all like the business situations we're discussing where people are typically focused on making a living through the exchange of goods and services.
As for n95, perhaps it was different in US, but in Poland there was no way I could find one in March. You couldn’t find them online anywhere regardless of price, and when I asked around, nobody had them available. I honestly wonder where could I make such an offer online - craigslist?
As for Titanic, agree.
Prior to the pandemic I had several boxes of n95/n99 which I bought years prior to manage California wildfire smoke. I donated most of them to local hospitals when they asked, but I always had a couple left in an opened box which they wouldn't take and I certainly would've sold them at a $1k price point if offered.
But, to be more clear, we're talking about reaching price equilibrium to manage demand, and the critique that wealthy people aren't limited by high prices. My argument is that things always have a price (if they're available at all, as you point out).
What I'd add is that the wealthy generally consume negligible amounts of resources in these types of scenarios. We didn't run out of masks because billionaires bought them all up. We didn't run out of gas because wealthy people are driving a lot. I think there's a fixation on fairness without stopping to consider whether the issue is particularly relevant.
Raising the prices changes the consumption behaviors for the majority, and that's what matters in terms of conservation.
Well, not really. It allows me to get more if I can afford it, regardless of need.
Let prices rise. People will scramble to send gas where it is needed to make a quick buck.
Those that it hits hard will drive a lot less. Those that hate the high bills will get more efficient vehicles.
Supply goes up, demand goes down, prices fall again.
https://sdlegislature.gov/Statutes/Codified_Laws/2072176
https://www.argusleader.com/story/stu-whitney/2015/04/04/whi...
Trying to force the price down causes a lot of problems.
Is it a large number of people buying just a little bit extra just in case or is it a small number of people buying a whole lot extra just in case?
If it's the later rationing seems reasonable; if it's the former increasing the price a small amount would work.
The bicycle is the most efficient means of human transportation on any kind of reasonably surfaces road or trail.
> The efficiency of human muscle has been measured (in the context of rowing and cycling) at 18% to 26%.
> This low efficiency is the result of about 40% efficiency of generating ATP from food energy, losses in converting energy from ATP into mechanical work inside the muscle, and mechanical losses inside the body
This little 125cc motorcycle get 125-150 mpg. Tops out at 55mph.
FWIW, I've seen some locals on FB talking about being unable to drive to doctors appts / the vet / work - and in every case so far - other locals have volunteered to drive them. Will definitely be awkward if the good Samaritans run out of gas too though. I suppose the few drivers of electric vehicles are about to become really popular with their friends and neighbors.
On a serious note, infrastructure security is almost always the last thing infrastructure designers ... design for.
Is diesel impacted as badly as gasoline out there? I've seen plenty about gas shortages, less about diesel shortages. In general, trucks tend to have far larger tanks than cars, so can ride through various disruptions a bit better if you're careful.
> and looking into buying a Prius.
Going from one liquid-fuel-only vehicle to another, even if it's more efficient, doesn't really seem to solve the problem of "liquid fuels are unavailable at the moment."
If you want robustness against stuff like this, go with a PHEV of some sort - Chevy Volt, RAV 4, Prius Prime, etc. You can do most of your regularly driving on battery, while still having the easy long distance range of a gas engine.
If liquid fuel is in short supply, don't do any long trips - just run on battery. On the other hand, if electricity is in short supply, most PHEVs make really good generators for at least limited loads. You typically can't find an inverter that runs off the high voltage pack, but most are good for 1500W or so on the 12V system. They'll just run the gas engine as needed to charge the high voltage battery, and run the DC-DC converter to support the 12V rail. It ends up being quite a bit more efficient than an open frame generator or inverter generator for light loads, though you're limited in what you can run. Storing 10 gallons of gas for a PHEV gets you quite a bit of electricity out of one, and it's no additional maintenance, because you're already maintaining the car. They're good options for uncertain times.
Infrastructure security has been, and probably always will be, a joke. Except it's not funny.
(Efficiency alone as a conservation measure is fatally flawed, as it's equivalent to a price decrease, and induces yet more demand, following the Jevons Paradox.)
In an intermittent-supply model, efficiency-plus-cache helps ensure survivability through a spell of unavailability. If you need to refuel once a month vs. once a week, you'll manage (on avarage) a two-week outage fine, whilst the once-a-week case is stranded for ten days (average).
FWIW, the Prius is made by Toyota, not Honda.
Exempting fuel haulers from the working hours requirements isn't about letting people drive 24hr straight. The goal is to let drivers and fleets absorb a delays (a routine thing in the trucking business) by putting in a 12hr driving day instead of having to park their truck because their driving hours are up or drive unsafely to make up lost time.
Nobody in trucking gripes about limited working hours. The current hours per week available for work are more than enough to work at an unsustainable rate of sleep. What everyone bitches about is the electronic logging requirements that prevent them from cooking the books in order to account for delays that happen over the normal course of business. Because people can no longer cook the books they do other things that increase risk.
For political and optical reasons the DOT can't exempt them from e-logs to make their lives easier. So they just exempt them from all of it. They're basically saying "if you're gonna push yourselves we'd rather you cut the smart corner and work a 12hr day than drive around like maniacs trying to fit X hours of driving in a Y hour window in order to make your books and records check out."
Because fuel deliveries tend to happen during business hours (say 5am to 10pm in this case) and trucks always deadhead back to wherever they fill up this exemption is more impactful than it would be for other subsets of trucking because it lets the trucks get back to where they started and fill back up so the next day's deliveries are not pushed off schedule.
Some people are going to prison, some other people are going to start taking infrastructure security more seriously, and fuel traders are going to make a lot of money.
This is exactly how our brittle infrastructure gets fixed in the best imaginable way. Millions of people minority inconvenienced so that politicians will start regulating a poorly self regulating piece of essential infrastructure.
Can you point to evidence that this has happened as you state it will? There's decades of stuff being impacted by various cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and I'm not aware of anyone going to jail over it (defenders claim Act of God, attackers are in some country without extradition treaties and can't be identified anyway, or just pay off the local government to protect them).
I'm also not aware of much of anything in the way of actually fixing the problems. Ask anyone who has done any red teaming at any level how often the bugs get fixed, and how often the report is filed away with a nice "Thank you for meeting our checkbox of having been red teamed, here's your check." And the same configurations are in play 5 years later. Keep your old notes, they may be useful!
> This is exactly how our brittle infrastructure gets fixed in the best imaginable way.
I'll bet it doesn't.
we don’t seem likely to get much done by security people making warnings, failure is the best teacher and i think the right people will learn at least a little here
I'll believe it when the next cold snap in Texas doesn't wipe out the grid.
This happened in 2011. The feds even made a report. Nobody did shit.
This happened in 2021. Nobody has done shit.
This will happen again. Nobody will do shit.
If doing shit costs money, nobody will do it. If you want it done, it needs to be law and the penalty needs to be jail, not fines.
No, because bankruptcy discharges the liability. And that's exactly what's happening in Texas right now is a bunch of companies are going bankrupt after having skimmed off the top.
If it's fundamental infrastructure, there should be minimum rules and if you fail those rules you go to jail. People died because a bunch of executives decided that it was too expensive to winterize properly.
Gee, wouldn't it be nice if there was only some mechanism to collectively fund essential infrastructure that the free market finds too unprofitable ...
Yeah, I'm kind of cranky about people who put "profit" and "essential infrastructure" in the same sentence.
There is scant evidence that contracting "essential infrastructure" out of government has actually improved things and lots of evidence that it has not (both the Texas (supposedly light regulations) cold snap fiasco and the ongoing PG&E fiasco in California (supposedly heavy regulations)).
There is currently an ongoing shortage on fuel tanker drivers[1] as the pandemic depressed gas demand, so the drivers went elsewhere. You need special certs to haul thousands of gallons of boom down the highway and when those drivers leave, they can only be replaced my themselves. Add the geopolitical situations in a number of hostile countries that I need not list and you theoretically have a pretty good opening for keeping the US at arms length long enough to play games.
All that said, I don't think the impact is great enough to actually be effective in this sense. The US has a decent strategic reserve for this kind of event. If the intent was to put the US in a poor starting position to prevent intervention in a foreign conflict it has not likely been sufficiently effective.
If this interests you, Red Storm Rising is a rather solid work of fiction about a similar event.
[1] https://kstp.com/business/experts-shortage-of-tanker-drivers...
Indeed it is! I believe some of the scenes in there were the result of table top war games played out, then written up.
Tom Clancy's writings are both really good, and lately really disturbing. I just finished Rainbow Six, and similarities to 2020 abound.
However it appears to be a standard ransomware attack which was probably targeted because of the size of the company (larger ransom) and the fact that this company has such a poor administrative IT infrastructure that they can't deal with this swiftly (Wipe, restore from backup).
Crypto in this sense is just a novel indirect payments system. Currency control is a red herring.
It's not as if lack of government endorsement is preventing usage now, and the fact that a cryptocurrency was sponsored by some foreign country should matter little.
How long it took to declare the same when COVID came to US?