{"id":59533,"date":"2021-09-27T06:27:43","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T11:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59533"},"modified":"2021-09-27T06:27:43","modified_gmt":"2021-09-27T11:27:43","slug":"the-march-of-folly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59533","title":{"rendered":"The march of folly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The march of folly<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It is of some interest that people have been contrasting images of British petrol queues this weekend with the petrol queues which formed back in 1973 as a result of the OPEC oil embargo.\u00a0 Not least because a more accurate comparison is with the fuel protests in September 2000.\u00a0 That is, this weekend\u2019s \u201cshortages\u201d are largely the product of a multinational oil company launching a media campaign aimed at avoiding having to improve the pay and conditions of its drivers.\u00a0 From past experience \u2013 including your rush to get toilet paper last March \u2013 you didn\u2019t have to be a genius to realise that publicising a faux shortage of fuel would lead to a run on the country\u2019s filling stations.\u00a0 They are, after all, just like banks in that if we all turn up at the same time, they break.\u00a0 And so, in a matter of hours fuel shortages became a self-fulfilling prophesy; aided by ministers taking to the airwaves to urge people not to panic.<\/p>\n

If anything, we have become even more dependent upon just-in-time deliveries today than we were 21 years ago.\u00a0 And back then it only took the loss of 15 percent of deliveries to bring us to the brink of a cascading collapse.\u00a0 This is because the real economy fails in the same way as\u00a0Liebig argued<\/a> that crops fail.\u00a0 The absence of one component is sufficient to bring about a total failure.\u00a0 So, for example, in September 2000 several English hospitals ceased treating people because of a shortage of Sucher.\u00a0 The operating theatres were ready to go.\u00a0 The surgeons were in place.\u00a0 The patients were ready to be anaesthetised…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The march of folly It is of some interest that people have been contrasting images of British petrol queues this weekend with the petrol queues which formed back in 1973 as a result of the OPEC oil embargo.\u00a0 Not least because a more accurate comparison is with the fuel protests in September 2000.\u00a0 That is, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[554,4053,31091,3237,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-59533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-natural-gas","tag-shortages","tag-supply-chain-disruptions","tag-supply-chains","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59534,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59533\/revisions\/59534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}