This kind of thing is enabled by crypto. It could still happen without it out of pure malice, but ransomware had little incentive before since it was so hard to collect on.
I definitely agree with the first. On the second, it would depend entirely on the design. And so long as one government crypto currency existed that was amenable to the practice, that should be sufficient.
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.
Ah, I now see your point. For the record, I think it's a valid one. Ransom did happen with cash, but it was much riskier - physical delivery had to happen, and it led to the criminals.
No, some idiots who are going to find themselves made examples of tried to do a ransomeware attack on another group of idiots who didn’t take computer security seriously enough who also happened to control a major piece of us infrastructure that they (claim) they shut down out of caution.
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.
> 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.
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.
The consequence needs to be liability and the penalty insurance coverage. Nothing like an insurance company tripling your rates after a bad audit to motivate executives. Threat of jail invites regulatory capture and obfuscations to evade prosecutors (who are most often defeated by making crimes as convoluted as possible so they don’t think they can convince a jury)
> The consequence needs to be liability and the penalty insurance coverage.
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.
Jail leads to the scummiest who don't care much about jail doing it, or it being impossible to find the service anymore because nobody wants to do it, and for essential infrastructure, you don't want a large amount of avoidance in providing infra.
> or it being impossible to find the service anymore because nobody wants to do it, and for essential infrastructure, you don't want a large amount of avoidance in providing infra.
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)).
Legislation that involves jail usually doesn't care if it's a government employee or a corporation doing it, and those govt employees will display similar avoidance behaviors.
> Some people are going to prison, some other people are going to start taking infrastructure security more seriously...
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 don’t think this one incident is going to fix everything, but i do think that a clear cut security incident affecting major infrastructure for millions will get at least a little political attention
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
Some Russian security "researchers" are going to be arrested the moment they set foot on US or Canadian soil for attending some conference or are going to be detained in transit. That's how it happens. Like it happened to the Huawei CFO. Some others are going to find their accounts frozen.
Probably not, but I will say the timing is suspicious.
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.
No, but some area already trying to blame Russia and China.
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).
It is 1000% rational for individuals to hoard and over-purchase during a shortage. Your charity will only lead to prolonged pain for you as everyone else hoards and over-purchases basic supplies. We saw it with a bunch of commodities last spring.
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.
Or let the price rise to equilibrate supply & demand. Rationing tends to create a black market as people who need cash more than they need fuel trade their fuel for cash with people who need fuel more than they need cash.
This comment is precisely right if the goal is to efficiently allocate capital, or if the state isn't prepared to punish those who violate rationing orders sufficiently to make the risk outweigh the reward (whether on the supply side or the demand side).
That would tend to allocate the resource according to wealth. It's probably not the largest issue here, but historically this has turned ugly when food shortages were involved and the market cheerfully prioritized middle class hoarding over lower class life-and-death needs.
Your reasoning may hold true in many cases. Just please don't follow this "resources are allocated according to wealth, full stop" line to the absurd as you did. You'll get revolts by the have-nots. They will go get what they need from the haves.
Money is not just an abstract store of wealth. It's a store of wealth backed by state violence.
I haven't followed anything to the absurd. This is how things currently are as a matter of fact. Using the above example, wealthy people will be able to get gas for their cars during a shortage, regardless of whether there's rationing in place. Whether we like it or not, this is trivially observable.
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.
The pointless throwaway account is right. Even if the have-nots revolt, they will immediately go back to using some form of money to exchange goods with each other. We can debate how wealthy individuals should become or how high tax rates can be, but wealth will always be how resources are ultimately allocated
When a mob, driven by ongoing deprivation, smashes your window and takes your goods - it may be a stretch to say money was the cause of the redistribution.
Revolts by the have-nots are pretty common in world history. Revolts by the have-nots where they actually succeed in displacing the haves are rare; I can only think of the French and Russian revolutions. Revolts where everybody suddenly has enough without creating new classes of haves and have-nots are unheard of.
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.
I lived in a communist country that rationed everything (meat, fuel, and so on, due to persistent shortages).
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? :,)
I didn't downvote you, but I think people may have downvoted you because some of the points you made are either not accurate or are somewhat misleading.
* 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.
Thanks for the reply. You are right that I conflated wealth with money. For a broad definition of wealth I think I can agree with you then.
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?
Yeah, people definitely had them. Not advertised, but I'm sure for $1k you could get one.
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.
Fellow former commie country citizen here. The limited value of banknotes made many black market operations barter-based in Soviet block, but I think if you see "money" in wider terms (i.e. as resources) that full-stop statement will hold true.
American consumers have been taught the incorrect cost-plus concept of price formation under which significant increases are tantamount to the imaginary crime of "price gouging."
You can do a tiered system. First 10 something gallons is 'rationed' price with it getting slightly more expensive as you want more. Allows you to get more if you really need it, but also ensures that most can get at least some. Albeit it is a lot more complicated to rollout.
Unfortunately we don’t have a better way of determining need other than the amount of work, wealth or property someone is willing to exchange for something. Open to good suggestions though.
Now you need government workers to decide all this. Costing lot and Reducing efficiency further.
So now the base level price of gas is much higher and you don’t have any extra gas to go around. Everyone is poorer.
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.
My biggest criticism of modern America (and elsewhere) is that individualism coupled with the internet has made many forget that you still live in local communities. You're not hoarding from unknown "others" you are hoarding it from the people around you. But it's hard to tell as society has become so disconnected, you can hardly blame people for not making the connection.
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.
Communities are also becoming bigger. My friends are in mostly one city but scattered over about a thousand square miles. I live in a small-ish community by most standards and yet know basically nobody around me other than a really nosy couple next door that keeps wandering into my garage.
I've always thought of it as some metric of public trust. If you trust the suppliers and government to step up and be honest about the situation you're currently in and how they're going to get out of it, you're less likely to feel the need to hoard things during a supply shortage. For most people it's about predictability, and trust in a system is a key part of predictability.
You statement stands on the assumption that rationing in itself has no price to pay, which is definitely not true. Rationing is complex, and expensive activity, even if you take the easiest form (e.g. 1 liter to every citizen). Also, rationing which takes into account differences of needs is even more hard, and more often than not is close to impossible. Without it rationing is inherently unfair, and may lead to more strain in society. Finally, it does breed black market, and corruption. All in all, there's no sense in it for a mild, and days-term shortage of something which is not drinking water.
Eh, probably true but the petro-people are good friends with the drone-strike & secret-detention-site people. I wouldn’t plan on international travel if I were in the ransomware crew.
Shouldn't you expect a criminal to misdirect and point the finger at someone else at this point! Have you even read a single crime novel, watched a mystery movie?
Not when the result would be them ransomwaring themselves. But I think it's pretty obvious I'm not going to be able to convince your superior 4D chess mind so I think I'll just bow out now. Good luck.
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 works best in the context where a resource's continued availability is assured, but the price increases.
(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).
I grew tired of the ever-growing body count in the Expanse books - it's kind of depressing if you think about it. But one thing I did enjoy was in one of the books where some of the protagonists score some bicycles on a devastated Earth to get around.
The bicycle is the most efficient means of human transportation on any kind of reasonably surfaces road or trail.
Tires don't need to be full of air! Can always patch them too. Most people just get new tires because why not but a good patch job will last a very long time.
Not the most efficient. Humans have only about 10% efficiency converting food energy to mechanical work. You could burn that food and power a combustion engine to get more work from it. Or burn some other fuel that's easier to get than food, such as wood or, well, oil.
A gallon of gas is 31,000 calories according to a quick Google search. I could ride a lot farther with those calories on a bicycle, albeit over more time.
> 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
I can ride 100 miles on a big plate of spaghetti. I have yet to see any kind of vehicle that can do that sort of distance on so few calories. Part of the equation is that modern bikes are quite light and do not add a lot to the total weight.
It's pretty wild that this order rescinds several regulations on truckers, as if that will suddenly increase the supply of tanker truck drivers? As if there's just tons of truckers hanging around who were ready to drive but too lazy to file tax returns?
This move increase the marginal capacity of the truck fleet.
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.
I live in Asheville NC, and apparently all of the gas stations in the local area are out of gas due to this. Seems like panic buying happened the second the local news began reporting on the pipeline hack. I'm just happy we didn't run out during the weekend at least. We're a big tourist spot, and most of them drive in, so it would have been extra awkward to strand them here.
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.
I wonder if this, along with the Texas winter crisis, will make people further get into off-grid, self-sufficient & all electric systems. Most houses in the US have enough roof estate to put enough solar panels to keep a daily car charged up. Add more panels, large energy storage and more efficient heating/cooling systems, and you might be able to run your house for some hours in an emergency.
"In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."
One technique which helped significantly in the Arab embargo in the 1970s was even-odd rationing: based on if your license plate was even or odd then you could buy gas on every other day.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadCrypto 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.
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.
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)).
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The bicycle is the most efficient means of human transportation on any kind of reasonably surfaces road or trail.
This little 125cc motorcycle get 125-150 mpg. Tops out at 55mph.
https://powersports.honda.com/street/minimoto/trail125-abs
> The efficiency of human muscle has been measured (in the context of rowing and cycling) at 18% to 26%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle#Efficiency
> 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
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.
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.
How long it took to declare the same when COVID came to US?