This stuff is so intellectually challenging, that must be why we always
get it wrong.
The reason we don’t have enough hand sanitizer is because something so simple is so regulated.
The FDA regulates hand sanitizer like a drug. Its ingredients are simple enough that it’s inexpensive most of the time.
But the regulations created a barrier to meaningful competition. And when demand spun out of control, there wasn’t enough supply. Prices soared and people who needed it were left without.
Got to have those barriers to competition, or else some consumer somewhere might have to assume some risk, and some manufacturer might have to be exposed to dog-eat-dog competition. Price spikes are the price we pay for making civilization infinitely safe, and supply crashes are the price we pay for avoiding the dreaded price gouging.
11 comments:
In a similar vein, Instapundit linked to this Medium article
https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0
Condensed version - part of the issue with paper product shortages is that the market is segregated between home use products and those used for commercial applications. With everybody staying (and poo-ing) at home, the demand for household products is skyrocketing while the market for the commercial stuff is drying up, and the two aren't really substitutes for each other.
A number of people have told me they managed to stock up on TP by getting it from commercial suppliers. I'm surprised that hasn't caught on more.
The regs on hand sanitizer are especially stupid, since they're essentially a mix of alcohol, and hand lotion. Or, particular to the Wuhan Virus, ordinary soap.
Regarding paper products for personal use, a newspaper in Australia printed an edition with 8 blank pages at no extra cost to the reader, the blank pages having a suggested use as TP. There's been a growing meme, too, that the New York Times editions could be used as TP as is, which seems reasonable to me, since outside the journalist guild, few Americans routinely show their a**.
Eric Hines
Just do not, whatever you do, put newspaper, rags, or other things down the pipe. Water, waste, and TP only. Otherwise the clogs are . . . impressive. our local plumbers all swear at, not by, the "flushable" wet wipes. Yes, they go into the system, but then they stick and cause blockages.
LittleRed1
We're on a septic tank, so we're really careful what we flush or put down the sink. It's AMAZING the things people think can be disposed of that way. In 15 years, we've had to have the tank emptied only once. I hear people complain of needing it every year. The nearby municipal water systems, with which I want absolutely nothing to do, report amazing things and fall apart expensively under a wide variety of conditions.
It's just alcohol or ethanol, mixed with some stuff and diluted. I use Germ fighter essential oil blends from Plant Therapy. Works much better all in all.
Texan99 -
The commercial channels of toilet paper are filled with product that has interesting characteristics. Some business will be conscious about either preventing theft or minimizing frequency of replacement and buy special dispensers to use jumbo-rolls of great size or tiny interior-diameter, both so that each roll has more paper (less frequent replacement = less time spent by the cleaning staff) but also so that there is no incentive for staff or others to take rolls home with them, as they won't dispense easily at home.
Other people with purchasing responsibility just note that some varieties of product last longer, and it doesn't occur to them that this might be because such varieties are so unfit for the purpose that people avoid any toileting that would require much use of paper. It's the old problem that the customer paying for the product isn't actually the user who must put up with the choice of product.
When we heard that our single-father-of-two-boys brother-in-law abroad was caught short with no 'loo roll' in the house, knowing that he's the sort that is , uh, "expert at negotiating", we advised him to inquire about availability of TP to purchase from the nearby independent restaurants that are still doing take-out service. That seems to have ended the crisis for now.
It's not great stuff, but after weeks of freaking out over shortages, it seems like it's good enough to get by on for a while. Everyone keeps joking about using newspaper and phone books and Hillary Clinton vanity publications.
Yes, and one's a lot less likely to plug the toilet or soil pipe with commercial toilet paper than you are with such alternatives.
TP lack is just a minor inconvenience. Be easy enough to rig a small handheld water sprayer to wash with. Tap it right into the sink plumbing to get warm water. Probably a good biz opportunity, somebody could come up with a kit.
Raven, the Japanese style toilets I see.
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