Toilet paper shortage

[F_Marturana]

Or turn it into cheese or yogurt? I guess they don’t have the means to go so.

 

[UpUpAndAway]

Sometimes that’s the case. Sometimes there are other obstacles.

When the French government stupidly shut down all the open-air markets, many dairy farmers who were processing their excess fluid milk into cheese howled because the open-air markets were their intended outlet for the cheese. (That decision has largely been reversed since.)

 

[christofirst]

Our local grocery store was offering a roll of paper towels available for home delivery for the first time in over a month . Of course, there’s no guarantee it’ll still be available when the shopper fills my order .

Assuming I don’t get sick and die (God willing!), I think I will continue to practice social distancing and isolation long after the rest of the world goes back to work and resumes their daily affairs, however that might look in a post-corona economy. As long as I’m retired and taking care of my aged mom, there’s no pressing need for me to reengage in public as I once did. I’m getting used to having things delivered and handling my finances and other business electronically or by mail.

 

[F_Marturana]

Ok.

But wouldn’t pets get dander on it by jumping over it?

On a different note, I saw a cat video playing the shell game and it guessed correctly every time.

And the other video type circulating, cat obstacle course, Vs dog obstacle course. Cats win all the time. I did see one very good pooch do it so very carefully.

 

[F_Marturana]

My husband found a huge package of TP, but it’s the fluffy cushioned type that is not really good for our pipes.

We haven’t needed to open it yet.

 

[UpUpAndAway]

But wouldn’t pets get dander on it by jumping over it?

My experience has been that a pet shedding dander would get it on everything in the house. It wouldn’t necessarily have to jump over anything to accomplish this.

I guess our last pet had good skin because we didn’t have a dander problem with her. On the other hand, she left her fur EVERYWHERE

 

[Convert3]

Went to Costco this morning and there was plenty of Scott TP and many pallets of paper towels. No disinfecting wipes, but they did have plenty of bleach. Of course, you have to buy 3 gallons!

 

[libbeylu]

It’s called “PANIC BUYING”…

 

[Glennon_P]

A friend of mine who has lived through several hurricanes during his Navy career said that this whole deal feels very much like a hurricane. Except most hurricanes don’t last months, happily…

 

[Glennon_P]

I was in the habit of watching the first minutes of the CBS Evening News each night at 5:30, just to get an idea of the top stories of the day.

No more.

All-Covid-19-all-the-time-doom-and-gloom-marathon.

Yes, this is bad. Real bad. But a steady diet of The Sky Is Falling does us no good, particularly when there isn’t a single thing any of us can do about it. I know the steps I have to take in my personal life (and my spiritual life too!) and I’m taking them. But subjecting myself to the latest bad news that I can’t control or change does me no good, spiritually or emotionally.

 

[Convert3]

Okay, now I’m really depressed…

 

[Daisy]

Digital or cards is the way to go. Nothing sinister about it.

Digital money values are easily manipulated unless it is encrypted. The dollar is now mostly digital. Do you remember the scales people used in the old days as a way to weigh gold to make sure people were getting their due wages, their due trade, their due justice? We have absolutely no gage for this these days, especially when everything is counted on a computer. Many opportunities for manipulating values and for hackers to hack the system as well. What happens when wells Fargo or our central bank just creates digital numbers out of thin air, and gives you a loan for 400,000, but is that real money? How do we know? Or are they just digits? What happens to the value of your years and years worth of 400,000 work? Is that justice? Is it fair for a bank to create money for free in order for you to pay them for that money over a lifetime? It devalues your lifetime of work. Unless there is a form of encryption, and our money is locked in to a certain limit.

As for a 16-year-old feeling confined, I know that it’s tough on young people, but plenty of young people around the world have had to deal with hardships and if having to be in the house for a couple of months is the worst thing he experiences in his young life, he’s probably still in the top 5 percent. His life is unlikely to continue this way for long in any event.

I guess my point was that I’d like for him to feel his work is worth some value, I want a future for him, and I’m not just referring to this quarantine. I was sort of using v it as zn analogy.

 

[Viki63]

Yeah, that milk dumping was a sin. Give it away, don’t throw it away.

I heard that the problem was, they had no jugs to put the milk in. The cows still have to be milked, but no way to store it.

 

[dochawk]

Yeah, that milk dumping was a sin. Give it away, don’t throw it away.

But how?

It was dumped not because the owners wanted to, or that anyone compelled them, but because there just wasn’t anywhere to put it.

The tanks were full, available trucks were hauling away milk as fast as they could arrive, and there was no more capacity to ship it away.

They had to empty tanks to make room for the fresher milk–with the alternative being to dump the new mill instead.

They can’t leave it in the cows or they stop producing, so the least bad choice is to dump the oldest milk.

(it’s pretty much the same thing that led to negative oil prices last week . . .)

They aren’t allowed to give it away.

No, that’s very much not what happened. While there are programs that prohibit distribution, this wasn’t one of them.

To give the milk to a food bank, someone would have to have a spare dairy grade truck, bottling facilities, and packages. It wasn’t like this could have waited a few hours; cows need to be milked every however-many hours or they stop producing.

I don’t think its fair that farmers are forced to dump milk that they should have a right to sell and worked hard to produce.

They did and do have that right. It was the farmers choosing to dump the milk, as there was no way to ship it.

I remember those days . . . both as a child and parent.

My daughter, with six children, has solved this by buying a cow . . . (she also just got delivered some meat chickens of some insane hybrid breed that you have to slaughter before maturity. Apparently you do the whole group at eight weeks, or the first broken leg, whichever cones first! )

I mean, does ANYONE even know what this " China trade deal" thing is even about?

Yes–but then, I’m an economics professor. But if I actually explained it, it would get twisted and go political within about three replies, so I’ll refrain, noting only that it’s in a better place than before the to-do started.

But people do know why Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt split up

Who?

If they’re football players, splitting forces the pass defenders to separately go after each receiver, instead of just covering the area . . .

 

[dochawk]

If I understand this correctly, oil customers who normally buy oil for $30, 40, or $50 dollars a barrel were for a time yesterday being paid $37 a barrel to take oil off the supplier’s hands because there was such a huge oil glut (surplus) that the suppliers didn’t have room to store it and needed to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Yes. For sound economic reasons, large portions of oil production are sold long in advance. Buy a futures delivery contract, and you’ve guaranteed oil for your factory for whatever period.

If you buy a lot of oil, you can also protect yourself from price fluctuations by buying futures that you will never use, as their price moves roughly with “spot” oil. That is, if the price of oil goes up, the sale price of your contract goes up a similar amount (but not exactly the same), and you’ve avoided the risk. This is actual “hedging”.

The thing is, these contracts do have to be performed. In normal times, the hedging company simply sells its contract at the end, and someone makes a buck or two by sending it to a storage, shipping, or refining facility.

This time, though, the refinery and storage tanks were pretty much full. The holder of the contract must accept the oil, or he will be liable for the huge costs the seller incurs in putting it somewhere, and whatever damages flow from that, and . . .

So as the “witching hour” grew near, it became a high dollar version of the kids’ game “hot potato”, and people were paying to walk away from the mess.

This has long been a theoretical possibility that intrigued economists, along with negative nominal intent rates (which have also happened).

This is a longer version, but your explanation is correct.

As someone posted upthread, sooner or later, toilet paper sales will crash because we’ll all have enough to last us into 2021. If not 2022.

At some point, people will run out of space in their living rooms . . . toilet paper now comes and goes a few times a day for order at Walmart, and a couple of times a day at amazon. I was able to get bleach at Walmart a couple of days ago, and happened to her at Winco the right time for another (actually, winco had both brand X and Chorox!). For the last couple of days, bleach has been generally available for delivery at Walmart.

But a steady diet of The Sky Is Falling does us no good,

Sorry, we are now out of Sky. Maybe we’ll have some hat can fall tomorrow.

 

[Michaelangelo]

Has anyone heard when toilet paper, disinfectant wipes, and liquid soap will become available again? In my area they are practically non-existent in stores.

Perfect time to learn how to make soap yourself. And a suitable disinfectant in a spraybottle is more effective and economic than those wipes.

 

[dochawk]

and putting two dollars in the candle box at church,

I have that on an automated monthly check . . . same for the poorboy and my weekly.

Or turn it into cheese or yogurt? I guess they don’t have the means to go so.

In hindsight, it sounds like a good idea–but that’s a lot of facilities to build and maintain for a once in a century event . . . yogurt requires raising to a high temperature to sterilize, dropping to a temperature where the bacteria can live, adding live yogurt to introduce the bacteria, and then keeping them warm enough to do their thing. I suppose you could do that in a dairy storage tank if it had electric heaters.

Cheese is more complicated . . .

airy farmers who were processing their excess fluid milk into cheese

French cheese is, err, it’s own thing.

Most of the world prohibits unpasteurized cheese, at least unless stored for some months (i.e., multiple incubation periods, as it’s raw milk!).

What the French call “culture” or “character” in a cheese, the rest of the world calls “bacteriological infection”!

If I understand this correctly, oil customers who normally buy oil for $30, 40, or $50 dollars a barrel were for a time yesterday being paid $37 a barrel to take oil off the supplier’s hands because there was such a huge oil glut (surplus) that the suppliers didn’t have room to store it and needed to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Yes. For sound economic reasons, large portions of oil production are sold long in advance. Buy a futures delivery contract, and you’ve guaranteed oil for your factory for whatever period.

If you buy a lot of oil, you can also protect yourself from price fluctuations by buying futures that you will never use, as their price moves roughly with “spot” oil. That is, if the price of oil goes up, the sale price of your contract goes up a similar amount (but not exactly the same), and you’ve avoided the risk. This is actual “hedging”.

The thing is, these contracts do have to be performed. In normal times, the hedging company simply sells its contract at the end, and someone makes a buck or two by sending it to a storage, shipping, or refining facility.

This time, though, the refinery and storage tanks were pretty much full. The holder of the contract must accept the oil, or he will be liable for the huge costs the seller incurs in putting it somewhere, and whatever damages flow from that, and . . .

So as the “witching hour” grew near, it became a high dollar version of the kids’ game “hot potato”, and people were paying to walk away from the mess.

This has long been a theoretical possibility that intrigued economists, along with negative nominal intent rates (which have also happened).

This is a longer version, but your explanation is correct.

 

[dochawk]

Its not right to have these discussions behind closed doors. Its the people’s money!

You can’t hold a negotiation, whatever the subject, publicly. It’s like laying all of your cards face up on the table playing poker.

Free trade gives the biggest gain to both sides. There are, though, things in which free trade is an amazingly bad idea, such as atom bomb, or even any munitions to psychotic, repressive regimes.

Slapping a tariff on imports does hurt the other economy–but it also hurts your own consumers more than your own producers gain (as a simple and insane example, the Japanese car protective tariffs cost US consumers something like $1M in high prices for every job saved. Or the 75% yacht tax. It collected something like $50,000, and completely wiped out the US yacht building industry–including jobs that paid $30M in income taxes . . .).

Anyway, the tariff might make strategic sense to let your own industry develop, but the huge losses are still there.

The losses on to the exporter are even greater.

Trade wars have generally been accepted as non-productive by economists, because of the damage to your own economy in slapping the tariff on the foreign goods.

This one time, though (and PLEASE leave any political comments about either party to the world news forum, or shout them out your window, or whatever), we seem to actually have gotten more damage removed from the board in the negotiations than the damage done in the process (but, when you’re the one damaged, it sure doesn’t look that way–few soy farmers will be happy to lose $100k even though it saves US consumers $5M . . .)

OK, I said I wouldn’t do this, and I did when it came up again. Again, PLEASE leave any finger pointing at either party for somewhere else (preferably where I won’t see it!
:crazy_face:

 

[Daisy]

They did and do have that right. It was the farmers choosing to dump the milk, as there was no way to ship it.

Dochawk, why are there empty shelves at my local grocery store, though? How hard is it for the producers to buy more milk containers? Unless perhaps those containers are from China.

I’m only going off bits and pieces from here and there.

I remember seeing somewhere that you were a lawyer.

 

[dochawk]

How hard is it for the producers to buy more milk containers?

Pretty much impossible on a moment’s notice.

I’m no dairy expert, but my understanding is that most of the time, the farmers sell to the packagers, and that it leaves the farms on trucks, not in packages.

I remember seeing somewhere that you were a lawyer.

I have a lot of hats

Lawyer, economics professor, software developer . . .