Crunch.
Well, this is just stupid. The last time we bought home heating oil, it was about 45p a liter. Yesterday, it was well over £1 a liter. Since the minimum buy is 500 liters, we were on the fence about ordering it now or waiting a few days to see if the madness passes. Earlier today, Uncle B got a message from our usual supplier saying, “don’t bother. We aren’t taking any new orders.”
No, we probably don’t have enough to get us through the heating season. It’s hot water bottles by day and fires by night for a while.
This sucks. We don’t even get our oil from Russia. This is hikes over supplies they bought in November, fer chrissakes. It’s all speculation, panic and profiteering.
Oh – gas, you ask? It was around £1.19 per liter a week ago. Now it’s £1.52. Let’s do the math, shall we?
£1.19 x 1.31 (today’s exchange rate) x 3.8 (to get us to a gallon) = $5.90 a gallon BEFORE and $7.57 AFTER.
This is exactly how the Greens wanted us peasants to live, you know: with a drastic reduction in our energy consumption (and quality of life, natch). Why does that make me deeply suspicious of this whole crisis?
The ugly-ass Blob People at the top are not relevant to this post. Mailchimp showed me this earlier, and now you have to see it, too. I reckon that’s a new low in dehumanizing depictions of the human form.
Posted: March 7th, 2022 under personal.
Comments: 13
Comments
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: March 7, 2022, 9:36 pm
Heh, Vice President Densepack said we should all buy electric cars now so we can go green.
Never mind there aren’t enough, never mind there’s no infrastructure to support their use beyond what amounts to hobbists, never mind they cost a fortune.
This reminds me of an old programming flow chart joke where all the labeled inputs and paths converge on a cloud image labeled “Miracle occurs here”. You can’t mandate success for your plans just because their yours.
I think perhaps they should consider what happens when “let them eat cake” is the response by out of touch leadership to the justified bitching of the rabble.
Comment from Gromulin
Time: March 7, 2022, 10:06 pm
They don’t want any kind of cheap energy. Cheap energy = Freedom. They want to undo the industrial revolution, this is their goal.
Comment from Subotai Bahadur
Time: March 8, 2022, 12:34 am
Sweas,
Speaking seriously, you and Uncle B need to be slowly and discreetly [or rapidly if you can, but that is hard] adding to your storable food stocks kept at home. Canned, dried, etc. Of course, things you both will eat. It is going to get hungry out as a consequence of the petroleum crunch that the American Democrats and their allies farther Left have created. Two reasons. Russia and the Ukraine are major exporters of wheat to the world [only beaten by the US and the police state of Canada]. The Ukraine is somewhat pre-occupied right now, as is Russia; however Russia’s immediate problem is more likely a screw up of their transportation infrastructure due to the war. There are literally only a few weeks for farmers to decide to plant and start the process. The loss of that share of the wheat crop will have bloody nasty follow-on effects on the world economy and food supply, including products that are not totally wheat based.
The second reason is that crop yields worldwide for pretty much everything are dependent on ammonia-based fertilizers. Those come from petrochemicals, primarily natural gas. Farmers worldwide will be making decisions soon as to whether they can afford to plant and how much based on the price and availability of those fertilizers.
Neither you two, nor I are likely to me mistaken for young adults. There are a bunch of meds I take to either just stay alive or to make life a lot more workable. I submit that y’all might want to do your best to stockpile a supply of needed meds to last in case there are interruptions of supply.
Subotai Bahadur
Comment from Mitch
Time: March 8, 2022, 12:55 am
Dammit Subotai, I specifically requested the non-dystopian 21st Century. This 21st Century is not want I ordered. I want to speak to the manager.
Comment from Mike In Fairfax
Time: March 8, 2022, 3:03 am
As the great philosopher Barbie once said “Math is tough!”
So instead of doing the math yourself when you have one of these problems, you can just drop text like the following into Google and let it handle the rate and currency conversion for you:
“£1.52 per liter in usd per gallon”
(I’d have inserted a screen grab, but I don’t think this blog is set up for such. Helps keep down the ass porn too, I suppose.)
Comment from quetzlovercoatl
Time: March 8, 2022, 10:44 am
“Why does that make me deeply suspicious of this whole crisis?”
I’ve read, and to be honest am too lazy to dig into, that Russia funded a lot of the greenies in Europe, specifically Germany, who agitated to close down their nukes. Not so in France apparently, good on them.
The Russkis may be devious and barbaric but they’re pretty good at the ol’ realpolitik.
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: March 8, 2022, 11:57 am
That was a “you give us Reds, we give you Greens” return thank you to Germany from Russia.
After all it was the Germans who helped Lenin and his commie buddies home to overthrow the Russian government.
World War One, the gift that keeps on giving.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lenin-returns-to-russia-from-exile
Comment from Tim Carlson
Time: March 8, 2022, 12:08 pm
Same here – petrol used to be p48 per litre, now it is slowly inching up and they are predicting p100 per litre.
Before: p48 / 52 (pesos per dollar) * 3.8 = $3.65 per gallon
Soon: p100 / 52 * 3.8 = $7.31 per gallon
That’s going to be a major hardship for the average Filipino.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 8, 2022, 2:16 pm
Holy shit, Mike – that works. Only with Google, though. The other search engines didn’t. And that gave me: 9.06136853 U.S. dollars per Imperial gallon phew!
I’m happy to let commenters post pictures, but I could never find a switch for that in WordPress.
We started stockpiling a month before the lockdown, Subotai Bahadur. With an emphasis on rice, flour and canned goods (and toilet paper, naturally). I thought there might be significant food shortages during lockdown, but they never materialized here. And I do have a stockpile of meds.
Since then, we have an inventory control issue: making sure the oldest stuff is eaten and replaced. Though, honestly, if you keep it dry, most dry goods will last forever.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 8, 2022, 3:12 pm
Uncle B just gassed up the car at £1.54 per liter. Using Mike’s trick, I was given $9.16617504 per gallon.
The expensive station along the way was £1.58 ($9.40425751 per gallon).
Comment from durnedyankee
Time: March 8, 2022, 3:46 pm
While I don’t mind seeing California (sorry BJM…) and New York pay for what they cheated into office, we aren’t going to avoid collateral price increase damage anywhere.
Last year we could get a dozen eggs at $1.20 even during the “OMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE MASKS MASKS VACCINES!” crisis.
Yesterday they were $2.24 at the poor people’s groceries store, and that isn’t the luxury grocery stores like Tom Thumb, Kroger or the various hoitty toitty stores like Whole Paychecks.
And we won’t even discuss the price of cow parts since we gave up looking at those when a less than gourmet cut started to price at $5/lb.
Comment from Deborah HH
Time: March 9, 2022, 12:03 am
We may all be vegetarians before this is over, though we do have room for chickens here. But yesterday I found paw prints in two of the raised-bed gardens. Big paw prints—not the neighbor’s house cat, but Brother Bobcat. This means I can’t just turn my dog loose in the backyard anymore. She’s a Chihuahua mix—too small to jump or climb the fence and too dim to dig under. She’s well-fed, too—on Tractor Supply’s finest 🙂
On a brighter note—our onions and leeks have sprouted. JavaMan has them under a grow light in my office.
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: March 9, 2022, 12:02 pm
@Deborah HH – for giggles and grins I stuck a “bad” onion in the ground on the pad in East Texas in December. It’s sprouting!
But the way we use onions we’ll have to do that about 600 more times to get through a year 😁
And the wild daffodils are blooming too!
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