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British petrol stations run out of fuel as motorists panic buy amid truck-driver shortage - ABC News:
Thousands of British petrol stations ran dry on Sunday (local time), as motorists scrambled to fill up amid a supply disruption due to a nationwide shortage of truck drivers.
[...] BP said nearly a third of its British petrol stations had run out of the two main grades of fuel.
"With the intense demand seen over the past two days, we estimate that around 30 per cent of sites in this network do not currently have either of the main grades of fuel," BP, which operates 1,200 sites in Britain, said in statement.
Lines of vehicles formed at petrol stations for a third day running as motorists waited, some for hours, to fill up with fuel after oil firms reported a lack of drivers was causing transport problems.
Some operators had to ration supplies and others closed petrol stations altogether.
The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said about two-thirds of its members were reporting that they had sold out their fuel, with the rest "partly dry and running out soon".
[...] The haulage industry says the UK is short tens of thousands of truckers, due to a perfect storm of factors including the coronavirus pandemic, an aging workforce and an exodus of foreign workers following Britain's Brexit departure from the European Union last year.
Several countries, including the United States and Germany, also are experiencing a shortage of truck drivers.
But the problem has been especially visible in Britain, where it has contributed to empty supermarket shelves and shuttered gas pumps.
[...] The government said it would issue 5,000 three-month visas for truck drivers starting in October, and another 5,500 for poultry workers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @06:37AM (5 children)
Also, with all these licensing requirements, you need capital (money) to obtain licensing/education.
With capitalism all of these capital expensive artificial barriers to entry don't exist.
It's funny how you talk about making money using money. You use money to get licensed to make money. You use money to keep renewing the licenses to make money. The government is artificially requiring you to use money to make money. In capitalism you aren't artificially required to use money to make money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @06:45AM (4 children)
(also, a lot of people go in debt to obtain education/licensing and whatnot. That's not capitalism. It's socialism and big government that creates the need to use money to make money and makes it hard for those without money to begin with to move up. The artificially expensive barriers to entry are exactly why we need to carefully look at licensing requirements).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:31PM (3 children)
Also let's also mention laws like
The pattern day trading rule
Laws that don't let you use Peerstreet unless you have an arbitrary amount of money or capital first
Laws that require you to pay auto insurance unless you have so much money you can put up for bond (you need to use money to make the money you can make driving to work or driving as an occupation). The need to pay auto insurance or hold so much money in a bond requires you to need money to make money.
Laws that require you to have like 100 million dollars in assets to be a qualified institutional investor of certain things if you want to invest in these certain things (laws that require you to need money to make money and lock others out of certain investments).
Laws that require you to have so much in assets if you want to be an insurance company, a bank, or a lender (not that I disagree with these laws).
Minimum wage laws that require employers to have so much money to hire employees.
Taxi-cab medallion laws that require you to buy a taxicab medallion (that used to go for like well over a million dollars, especially when adjusted for inflation, before ride share was around) just to either drive a taxicab or to be able to hire someone to drive a taxicab (these laws I disagree with). Again, another law that requires you to need money to make money. Then taxicab companies that hold these limited medallion licenses that put their workers under a 1099 want to try to shut down competing ride share companies and when that didn't work they want to force the competing companies to classify their workers as employees.
Patent law that requires you to pay a potentially expensive patent licensing fee just to make something (or to own a bunch of expensive to acquire patents to cross license with others).
FDA approval laws that require you to spend a ton of money on R&D and pay FDA fees to sell and market certain products (again, not that I disagree with these laws).
I'm not necessarily against all of these anti-capitalistic laws (many of which are licensing laws) that artificially require you to need money to make money but what I am saying is that we need to look at them carefully. Many of them may exist for the wrong reasons (to keep those without money out hence limiting competition and to collect revenue for various entities).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:42PM
Also, don't think that Jeff Bezos grandstands in favor of increasing the minimum wage for altruistic purposes. He wants to increase the minimum wage because he knows that his competitors, companies like Target and Wal-Mart, are more labor intensive than Amazon. So increasing the minimum wage will require his competitors to raise their prices which will drive more people to Amazon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @12:49PM (1 child)
(minimum wage and labor and labor insurance laws that require employers to have so much money to hire employees. Sure, you need money to hire employees regardless but all of these laws artificially increase how much money you need to hire employees).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 28 2021, @02:05PM
It is big government that artificially imposes a need for money to make money and that artificially increases how much money you need to make money. Not capitalism. Big government bureaucracy. Expensive to comply with rules and regulations that only the rich can afford to comply with that keep the poor out.