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Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

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Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#161

Post by dang »

powowowow wrote: post #84
zkms wrote: post #54

This is the cruel and predictable result of a society that has meticulously and senselessly offshored/outsourced most its industrial capacity. If your country can't manufacture, from raw materials , all the electrical/electronic/mechanical components, the tooling, the equipment, and the chemicals (industrial and pharmaceutical alike) it needs to keep everything running, you're dependent on these hyper-fragile and con…

The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history. They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources. The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices th…

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and especially omit personal attacks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#162

Post by Seenso »

powowowow wrote: post #84
zkms wrote: post #54

This is the cruel and predictable result of a society that has meticulously and senselessly offshored/outsourced most its industrial capacity. If your country can't manufacture, from raw materials , all the electrical/electronic/mechanical components, the tooling, the equipment, and the chemicals (industrial and pharmaceutical alike) it needs to keep everything running, you're dependent on these hyper-fragile and con…

The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history. They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources. The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices th…

> The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.

And they've delivered that by building a fragile system with too little safety margin or redundancy.

It's like building an application that can serve the absolute greatest number of requests for the absolute lowest price by having absolutely no redundancy. It looks great, until a disk fails.

> The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with.

I wouldn't call those choices informed, it'd call them myopic. A smart, informed choice with a time horizon of 6 months can be an exceptionally stupid one with a time horizon of 30 years.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#163

Post by beaunative »

beaunative wrote: post #153
hardtokill wrote: post #25

We really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively Forcing uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migra…

Mixing facts and lies, and write unintentional things as if they were intentional is really the best way misinform people. I really don't see why should China try to hide an outbreak. China will be, and is hurt the most without a doubt. China isn't mother nature, you can't just assume its government is somewhat almighty, knows everything before its happened and blame it for not doing anything. No government can be th…

The only sane explaination why any government would try to downplay it will only be of one reason, they don't know how serious it could be, and frankly, when the outbreak starts in China, we know nothing about the virus, but at this moment, we have much more accurate data and research about how the virus works, and we should expect our governments to have better solutions at hand.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#164

Post by parliament32 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #134
powowowow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history. They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources. The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices th…

> They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change. Except that the difference was never that large and never had to be that local. What happened was that they didn't want a $42 sweater made on the same continent over a $40 sweater made on the other side of the world, because it gave back $2 in change.…

>the different was never that large

Here's a basic sweater for $3.19: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/women-s-autumn-clothi...

Find me one made in the US within a factor of 10 of that price.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#165

Post by AnthonyMouse »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #157
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change. Except that the difference was never that large and never had to be that local. What happened was that they didn't want a $42 sweater made on the same continent over a $40 sweater made on the other side of the world, because it gave back $2 in change.…

I actually looked into american made clothing: Jeans. American-made jeans are anywhere from $160-300. I can also buy some jeans at Levi's for $60-100. It is not as small as you depict and also not as large as you are responding to, but it is still a very real gap.

First search hit for "american made jeans", prices in the same range as your Levi's, some lower:

https://www.allamericanclothing.com/made-in-usa/jeans.html

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#166

Post by adtac »

pesfandiar wrote: post #96
throw20190125 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have nothing against you, but I wish more people would get burn by the sms 2fa without backup/alternatives. Maybe at some point we will realize that it's a terrible idea.

Any 2FA is inherently susceptible to losing one of the factors. It's designed to deny access when only one factor is present, so this is kind of a feature not a bug, and part of the security-vs-convenience tradeoff. Do you have any specific reason to think SMS 2FA in particular is a terrible idea?

Not if you have a password-protected Yubikey with GPG/RSA signing, encryption, and authentication keys and a second backup Yubikey with the same keys. If you lose one, order two more ASAP, use the backup key to change your keys in every machine and revoke that key (thereby rendering the lost Yubikey and your backup useless). Wait for the new Yubikeys to arrive, generate new keys, change all machines to these new keys, and revoke the temporary keys you generated.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#167

Post by tanilama »

I used to be a globalist myself, which I still am, but I think globalization needs its urgent refactoring.

Not all industries need to be fully globalized, and it is better every country keep some share of production to itself to account for emergency situation like this virus.

Globalization had trade off robustness for efficiency, it is time to scale that back.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#168

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

tome wrote: post #50
dumbfoundded wrote: post #18

This has happened to my company and a few others I know. We have about $15K of packaging stuck in China. If this is doing anything (to me personally), it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.

> it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different. If the prices weren't really that different then why did those parts of the supply chain go to China in the first place?

Just because they were different then doesn't mean they are as different now.

As automation increases China's position weakens.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#169

Post by _bxg1 »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #102

"It's better to be in a bad deal with good people, then a good deal with bad people" China MFG was/is not a deal with the Chinese people. It's a deal with the CCP. Those of us who always understood this aren't surprised by any of this. We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well and we watched helplessly as they exported that risk abroad in the form of pollution, SARS, contaminated products and mo…

To be fair, they seem to be handling this crisis better than we are so far.

Re: Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies

#170

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

tootsandboots wrote: post #143
wasdfff wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1940s sweaters were american made, did not cost $400, and the median american had more disposable income than now. The people who benefitted from outsourcing were those buying shares, not sweaters.

In 1949, a nylon sweater cost about $7.95 ( https://mclib.info/reference/local-history-genealogy/histori... ), which in 2020 dollars would be about $86.41. So not $400 and about in line with what an average sweater today would cost. However, the median American did not have more disposable income back then compared to now. In 2020, the median American has about $16763 in disposable income, whereas in 1959 (the furthe…

That $7.95 stayed in the domestic economy. The 99% are slowly exporting their wealth.
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