Gas Supply in the Eastern US

Well dang it. I had to cancel my activation tomorrow because all the stations around me are now either super low or sold out of gas. The panic run on gas due to the pipeline shutdown strikes me as both annoying and comical - similar to the toilet paper hoarding that was going on near the beginning of the pandemic.

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Well if you still have plenty of hoarded toilet paper, this might be what you need to keep activating. :man_shrugging:

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Hi,
There is a pattern present. Nearly every week there is a message of something being unavailable: gas, containers, bicycles and its parts, computerchips and so on and so on.
My idea is that Corona has revealed something that was not on the radar before:
an issue with the mentality of people + a considerable structural issue within economy/logistics/production.
73
Patrick ON4BCA

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Hello Patrick, I have came to the same conclusion as you, similar in VK as ON4

73 de Geoff vk3sq

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I think one of the permaculture folks says the opposite of efficiency isn’t inefficiency, but resilience. An efficient logistical chain is therefore usually not very resilient to sudden failures, like pandemics, chip-fab fires and reverse-parked container ships in the Suez.

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Efficiency includes keeping in mind failures.Blind optimism focused on making fast and big money leads directly to implosion.

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No gas shortage in California, by law this state does not import gas, oil is prevalent in this state and refining, again by law, must be done in state. So, I can get gas…at over $4 a gallon for regular.

As to other products, our ports in SoCal have cargo ships in a holding pattern outside the harbor due to a shortage of longshoremen to offload.

That’s nothing, a US gallon of petrol here in Scotland costs $5.94.

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And non-metric units cost your sanity. :rofl:

Sorry I could not resist

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I buy my petrol in litres Joe. 4.54L = 1 Gallon. So 9L is 2 gallons. From there you count 9s to get the volume in gallons x 2 as the pump shows litres. My last fill was 32L. So that’s 4 off 36 so about 8 and a bit gallons. Car computer was saying 33mpg, 8 * 33 = 264 miles and trip computer showed 257 miles. All the numbers were in the right ballpark which suggests everything running normally. I did 220miles to the contest site and back and went most of the journey in eco mode and the mpg was 43. It was 51mpg before I had a wee blast in sports mode :wink:

Petrol has had to be sold in litres in the UK since 1995 so that’s 26 years of doing those calculations in my head. You just get used to the mental gymnastics because you do it all the time.

My car is set to imperial, mpg, miles per hour etc. Strangely the TPMS tells me the tyres pressures in Bar not psi. Not an issue as the air pumps at the garage forecourts all have a psi/Bar selector. The label on the door gives the pressures in Bar only. I have no idea what the pressures would be in psi on this car, I’ve always hit the Bar button and set the limit to 2.4 (front) and 2.6 (back). There’s no point in knowing really. Sure it’s about 2.4 * 15 if I had to do it because I found some antique air pump somewhere.

Weather forecast temperatures have been in Celsius since 1995 too. I no longer really comprehend temperatures in Fahrenheit any more. We have a newspaper which is rabidly right wing, pro Brexit with an island fortress mentality. Since Brexit they have reverted to giving temperatures in Fahrenheit. It makes their older readers who overwhelmingly voted leave some comfort that all this “dirty European nonsense” has been removed :frowning:

A US gallon is 3.78 liters. An imperial gallon is 4.54 liters.

wunder

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And your point is caller?

It could be worse; consider the stone, furlong, fortnight system!

Yep, it’s called Just In Time (JIT) Supply Chain Management. One little hiccup and it all breaks down.

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Or cubits

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I think my generation ( same age as Andy) grew up with a range of units - so for length I will use thou (thousanth of an inch) for things like a spark plug gap, then mm, then cm, then will usually switch to inches, feet, and then back to meters. Miles for driving but Km for walking… and just like Andy I do the mental maths to work out how many Imperial Gallons of Fuel is going in the car whilst everything else (apart from beer) is in litres - unless it is liquid a recipie in which case it will be in ml or fl oz but I can remember that there are either 16 or 20 of those in a pint, depending on what side of the atlantic you do the math(s) on. Even weight (the size of me not the physics definition) manages four different versions, Kg, Lbs, Stones and Lbs and if you want to be really awkward Stones and decimals…unfortunatly whicever unit I use it is still too much particularly when walking uphill which is in meters on the map, but to make me feel better I usually mentally convert the height gain to feet as it sounds more impressive… Thank goodness electrical units do not have an imperial version - I can’t begin to imagine an imperial version of a Smith Chart…

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23 years of diabetic clinic has firmly put me in the kilogram camp. I no longer know my weight stones etc.

Having implemented a couple of supply chain initiatives, I’m very aware of this. It is an astute callout - the normal, efficient, no waste system is build without any sort of redundancy. This is an error in design, but it is how many are enabled.

Just circling back to my original post… the supply chain is catching back up and the percentage of stations in North Carolina is now below 45% sold out. It had increased to nearly 80% of stations in the state out of gas over the weekend. They expect all to be back online in the next 10 days. So maybe Celo Knob is back on for this weekend!

Interestingly, UK roads are measured in metres (this can easily be seen on the 100 or sometimes 50 metre motorway road markers - the little stakes just off the hardsholder - usually has something like M5 and below it 8.2 - 8.2Km from start of M5 motorway - easy to locate you if you breakdown) - although distances on road signs are displayed in miles.

The standard Smith chart relates normalised impedance (or admittance) and wavelengths. It doesn’t depend on any particular units.

Martyn M1MAJ

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