From what I can tell just speaking to the relatively small amount of people around me there does seem to be a rural / urban divide somewhat in this. Up north I’ve only spotted one filling station that was coned off closed, and that was on the only big road to a port which sees a lot of traffic. I’ve heard similarly that there were no problems from friends in Norfolk or Yorkshire.
I have heard of issues and seen some photos of Sussex and Oxfordshire with massive queues.
I wonder if perhaps more people use a car very infrequently then suddenly pop up to fill it to the brim on getting the panic signal from the paper.
Either way If I split my driving across vehicles and re tax some as needed I’ve probably got a month or two before I’d get desperate for a fill. And I expect the pumps to be back to normal in the UK within a week or so
So when saying there is no supply problem with fuel, where would that extra fuel go ?
As was posted further back, the key to extra fuel usage is that most people drive with nearly empty tanks, and when their gauge goes into the red they put in say £20. This is hugely obvious when you go into a petrol station to pay; you see a stream of people handing over £10 or £20. I am sure it is same in Germany which has traditionally preferred cash over credit cards (probably nobody with a credit card will be doing something so pointless). With the public panicking, suddenly all these people are filling right up. This has created a big one-off fuel sale.
The key to extra petrol station traffic is that most people fill up only when they feel the need to, whereas now many (who would have otherwise always filled right up, which is the only option for anybody sensible) are filling up when they are just down to say 90%. The suggested solution to this is to have a minimum spend of say £30 but politically that is impossible (screams of hitting the poorest people, etc).
One bit which I wish online papers would disable right now are the totally useless comment sections.
Yes I can’t see why they bother. The comments are almost entirely from complete morons – same as stuff posted on FB, twitter and much of the “trivia” social media 
They have to employ someone to mod them, too.
Labor has traditionally always been free in a global perspective
Actually, all money we pay for a product or a service is a payment for labour. Materials are free; they were put in the ground by the creation of the solar system, itself the product of supernova explosions. And products made from the atmosphere (e.g. oxygen in a cylinder) are also from the ground; the result of the earth outgassing, and anyway all the low elements, apart from helium and/or hydrogen (?) are the product of supernova explosions Karl Marx, and every respectable environmentalist, would now revolve in his grave at 2400rpm
There is a one-off demand, equal to the difference between (tank with £20 in it) and (full tank), times the number of cars on the road which are filled up using the “£20 regime”.
Yes I can’t see why they bother. The comments are almost entirely from complete morons – same as stuff posted on FB, twitter and much of the “trivia” social media They have to employ someone to mod them, too.
Interesting article in this context. Maybe a landmark ruling in Australia on the subject
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/29/media/cnn-facebook-pages-australia-intl-hnk/index.html
Yeah, but where will this go?
FB is a business model where people can post more or less anything, and it is financed by advertising and by FB selling the user and audience behaviour data, and selling a facility to plant messages to these people (for political campaigns etc).
You have to either believe this is something which should be allowed, or you don’t.
But for sure FB is not able to fully mod the content. Currently they are employing perhaps thousands of people to remove anti-vacc material; this is under threats from various countries they operate in. But they cannot do this generally. So e.g. there will be no way to make them not carry messages about such and such a petrol station having just had a delivery, enabling 1000 people to all drive there and queue up. And similarly for organising political protests, and everything else which FB gets used for. And people can use whatsapp groups for that; my “village group” here is using WA to spread news about where a petrol tanker was seen.
This cannot be stopped.
I use FB minimally; mainly to promote EuroGA 
and then for having a non-PC laugh with non-PC friends, like this
If FB disappeared, we could use other channels to have a laugh.
The “news” on FB, while it is the entire world view of so many less-than-bright people, is worthless because you cannot tell who planted it. I use a plug-in called Facebook Purity to suppress all that crap.
Fundamentally, internet forums cannot be modded. EuroGA can be because of low traffic. If there was say 100x more traffic then we would need to employ mods and would need to carry adverts to pay for that. But even sites that do that (and I know some) don’t actually read all posts; they rely on people clicking the Report button.
Peter wrote:
This cannot be stopped.
No, I agree. However what CAN be stopped is online newspapers and news providers in general allowing commentaries, if they are made responsible for the content.
FB is a different scale of problem. Newspapers however are read by millions and so are the comments. Most comments are beyond the pale, inflamatory and do not represent the general public at all, because only comparatively few people with too much time and axes to grind use them.
Therefore I find the ruling remarkable as it would open the way for many papers to shut down their commentary sections “honorably” i.e. without pissing off their readership.
if they are made responsible for the content.
A publisher is always responsible. There is no way to publish something damaging to someone, and do so with impunity.
But maybe this FB thing is a different issue which I don’t understand.
Peter wrote:
the normal fuel delivery driver e.g. TEXACO is on a £60k contract
Is this for real? That’s 70k€. For driving a lorry? That doesn’t add up. Driving trains with 300km/h with 500 people in the back gets you 50k€. A bus/lorry maybe 30k.
