Did shopping yesterday, supermarket refusing to stock shelves with dunny rolls, say they have had a gutfull of abuse by invaders.
Call in at service desk for those items.
No queue at service desk.

Also have posted up sign saying NO REFUNDS on personal care items.
Looks like ebay sellers are trying to return unsold packets as bottom had dropped out of market.

Local paper shop had a pile of dunny rolls for sale yesterday morning.
Makes sense its all paper!
Still not sold out today, maybe common sense is setting in.
Fred.

Maybe toilet paper has reached saturation

The stupidity continues:

QUOTE: Woolworths revealed today it was selling seven weeks supply of toilet paper each and every day.

It is indeed stupidity. Unfortunately, the things that bring out the best in most of us, bring out the worst in the rest.

I commend Woolworths for reserving their first hour each day for old age pensioners and the disabled. This way, those who are vulnerable, not only to the virus but to the nefarious nature of others, can buy what they need before they get their heads beaten in and their groceries stolen.

Yesterday, it was reported that a blind chap had his dunny rolls stolen from him by a passer-by. People who do things like this should be tied up and flogged with the Cat and it should be done in public so the punishment serves as a potent deterrent.

Geez at work tonight and the building I'm in usually holds 500 people . Only 25 came to work today they said.

Globally, if businesses are forced to close (with some small ones maybe never to reopen), and their staff laid off (in Oz the retail sector being the second largest employer), then things like rent and mortgage payments become a major problem, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine how it was in the late 1920's following the stock market dives and the runs on banks.

Also, if the loony herds continue to empty shops of food and other essential items, then a return to a rationing system not seen since WW2 may eventuate.

Suddenly, everything old is new again.

Yep, panic played a large part in the crash of 1929.
Let's face it the economy was on the down turn before we had even heard the word coronavirus .The government has relied on cash generated by china and the sale of Australian icons to keep us out of the mud.
Plus much of the new wealth that has generated over the past few years was not from workers saving ,it was generated from real estate and housing booms . Many people bought a house for 300k and in a very short time it was worth 1.5 million, this gave them borrowing power like never before and boy did they borrow.
Well paying it back with no job in a recession maybe a different kettle of fish .

Pete

We have via our Governments & lunacy, systematically destroyed or sold off, since the end of the Menzies era: Everything we created up to that point.

With regard to the economy, as many pundits have said, whilst Australia's economy is the 12th most powerful in the world, it is not diverse enough to cop a blow like the one we are facing at the moment, even before accounting for the natural disasters we have also faced in the last year or so.

Our two biggest growth industries in the last twenty years have been mining and warehousing. We are a mine and a store room for the world to use at its beckon. The obvious improvement is needed in domestic manufacturing. It has to make a comeback, even if it is a small one, it'll be better than just relying on the original source of coronavirus for everything we need.

Our governments (all of them) need to wake up and smell the roses on electricity generation. The flat refusal to build new coal-fired or nuclear plants in this country is giving manufacturers the jitters, particularly in metal manufacturing, where huge amounts of energy are used.

I spent last weekend in the Snowy. Driving down last Friday I noticed the wind farm south of Goulburn stationery. Dozens of wind mills and not one of them was generating so much as a single watt of power. They can't, unless the wind is blowing. Heavy industry cannot depend on that crap and a 24/7 supply is needed.

The financial sector is strong but only because the Commonwealth Government forces the banks to store billions of dollars in capitalisation deposits to protect them from failure. Most of Australia's money is stored in Martin Place - where the Reserve Bank plus Australia's two biggest retail banks are headquartered. There needs to be more savings made by Government - don't ask me how though, I am not an economist. All governments need to retire any debt they have and some of them are huge. The NT, even though its debt is only about $3bn, only 235,000 people live in the NT, so this territory has the highest debt per capita ratio in Australia and the NT Government is on the brink of insolvency. QLD is next, with $85bn of government debt. The QLD Government has refused to plan any method to pay it off. VIC is next, actually having a plan to increase debt from $25bn to $55bn, supposedly to fund infrastructure. The debt per capita ratio will still be half that of QLD but it is still not a sustainable debt to carry. WA has a debt of around $40bn. It has to be paid off too. NSW has no debt at the moment, with the NSW Government paying off $42bn of debt some years ago. It will go into debt again due to the stimulus package it is bringing on to help tackle the economic turndown due to the Coronavirus. One thing that may help NSW through the rough times ahead is that there is already a gargantuan infrastructure programme underway, which is being funded from several sources.

Depending on tourism is asking for a Greece-style meltdown to occur here. It's an important industry but it cannot be allowed to overtake others as chief forms of national income. This isn't to say that tourism should be wound back. It IS to say that other industries aren't growing at the right rate.

All our governments need a solid message sent to them (and I hope that, perhaps in vain, that the Prime Minister and all state Premiers and territory Chief Ministers read this comment) - stop wasting our money on climate change initiatives and boat people and stop selling out our jobs to the Chinese Government and get this economy moving now before it falls in on YOU, not us, YOU. Because you will be voted out if Australians start losing their jobs.

Brad, WELL SPOKEN.
Fred.

Our problems started way back in the 1970s. Those who make the world decisions behind closed doors decided that the rampant unionism and high inflation at that time made Australia an unfavourable place to manufacture goods. They could be made much cheaper overseas.

Forward to now, and although the unions are considerably weakened, the costs have not. You have to consider the costs of workplace safety, payroll tax, compulsory superannuation, the enormous mass of red tape, and penalty rates. These problems don't exist in Eastern Asia, so by now, almost everything we use is made in China. China is also our biggest export market, and a large part of tourism comes from there too. So, any change in the situation there can ruin us, whether by accident, or even on purpose. We need to diversify our markets, so that a single country cannot hold us hostage as it is now.

Now, it might be morally right to have penalty rates, safety, superannuation and so on, but those things don't count to the bean counters. It's the cheapest option that matters. Those in power must decide if they want this country to grow or decline. If you want people to buy Australian-made goods, they have to be cheaper than those made overseas. Price is the only thing that matters to struggling families and pensioners.

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I agree with the electricity generation comments. I don't care where it comes from, but it must be 24*7 reliable, and cheap. Coal and nuclear would seem to be the best placed to deliver those requirements.

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As for the virus itself, was it an accident or on purpose? If it was on purpose, then it is a fiendish exercise indeed. Let's consider that.
China seems to have it under control, but no other country does. Did they already have an antidote? Perhaps it is biological warfare, ready to be fanned into panic by the uncontrolled western media. Soon, therefore, China will be clean while the rest of the world is sick and out of action. An ideal time to launch a war, wouldn't you say? Or, since everyone will be working from home, a great time time to attack a country's telecommunications infrastructure.

I have no idea of any of this, just putting it out there. If it happens, don't say you're surprised.

The coronavirus, like HIV, the flu and a number of other serious viruses, originates in bats and other animals and ends up in humans principally because of lack of hygiene, people (usually dirt poor and uneducated) living cheek by jowl with host animals, and because a lack of policing of food hygiene. The so-called "wet market' in Wuhan province, like many in Asia, was trading illegally and the police/government turned a blind eye to it. Add to that the amount of international travel these days and you get pandemics.

Until governments get seriously tough with such markets and unhygienic practices, we can look forward to more of the same.

Personally, I think China is lying through its teeth with regard to the claim that they have matters under control. If they did then their scientific people wouldn't still be in the race to develop a vaccine for it. GTC is right about most of these diseases coming from animals but also the animals that live on them. EG: rats and the fleas that jump from rat to rat. The same happened in Sydney 200 years ago with the bubonic plague and it was centred on The Rocks and the damp conditions of the day, where poor stormwater drainage and no sewerage system led to the rat infestations.

Many, even most, of the buildings between George Street and the Hungry Mile predate the Sydney Harbour Bridge by decades. A standard consideration when refurbishing one of these buildings is the installation of damp-proofing to stop the moisture from the ground rising up the walls. Ways of doing this didn't exist back then.

I don’t see a future for wind or solar reliably powering anything large scale! It’s simply ignorant for people to say solar and wind are “Clean” energy’s. with solar panels not being recycleable except for the surrounding aluminium frame and the mass amount of greenhouse gasses produced by wind during its manufacturing and installation those current technologies don’t suit our world.
Not to mention solars short life cycle with the only solar “recycle” station in Australia already completely overrun with faulty panels! With current technology I strongly believe thorium nuclear energy is the way to go. Thorium doesn’t need purification like Uranium and is three times more common than. Thorium is also a fertile element meaning it’s hard to use for a nuclear war (which is why America didn’t use it in the Cold War) so in order to kick start the fissile reaction a small amount of plutonium is required which means it’s a lot safer as all you have to do is remove the plutonium and the reaction dies out. Mind you there are also plugs that melt away and would let the liquid thorium drop into emergency tanks under the reactor in a worst case scenario. Now with stability, a turbine on a nuclear power plant would sustain Melbourne under full load for 2 minutes after the reaction stops giving everyone a fair amount of time to switch to a different power source. Something wind and solar could never do.

Now long term ideally Australia should designed and built a fusion reactor which don’t even use radioactive elements and produce elements like helium as a byproduct! Which is great as that’s the only way helium can be made.
Anyway penny for your thoughts

I laugh at these windy people. When it comes to the generation of electricity on an industrial scale, the average Joe is totally clueless. If they know anything at all about generation, it comes from having a generator on a bicycle as a kid, and a watt, let alone gigawatts, means zip to them.

I have always been a fan of nuclear but, like religion and politics, it's a subject that wasn't raised in social settings.