Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 275 posts

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

#181

Post by tentboy »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #33
youngprogrammer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: Our caterer in silicon valley said there was a supply issue for tofu.

So I guess they import the beans, manufacture the tofu, then ship it back to us? Sounds inefficient, though I'm not sure how much demand there is for a large-scale domestic tofu manufacturing industry in the US.

Trans-oceanic shipping is actually incredibly cheap that companies will do things like this if they are able to save a bit of money

see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-t...

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

#182

Post by glofish »

parliament32 wrote: post #164
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.…

>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.

the point was that once the production is destroyed you can't catch up, retooling is very expensive,

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

#183

Post by beaunative »

lutorm wrote: post #46
core-questions wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term, and may also result in moving some manufacturing jobs back to the US. As the standard of living rises in China, labour costs will increase until eventually the only way it will really be cheaper to do things over there is because of either better logistics, or lax environmental/labour laws that enable shortcuts we can't/won't take here. The latter is…

This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term... Well, this is the problem, right. Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis, otherwise it's a net cost. So if you're outcompeted by the other non-resilient companies before that crisis happens, it doesn't help. I feel like societal resiliency needs to be rewarded (in many contexts, utilities are obvious but also food supply, etc) but I don't k…

Rsillience can not be the primary objective of capitalism. It's not possible. Ironically, socialism is based on the idea of being most resiliant. Think hard why China turned that ship to a different direction.

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

#184

Post by save_ferris »

_bxg1 wrote: post #169
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.

How many whistle-blowers trying to alert the public to this disease did the US government throw in prison?

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

#185

Post by philtable »

_bxg1 wrote: post #169
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.

They created this crisis by silencing whistleblowers and hiding case numbers. Don't forget they banned wildlife markets during SARS, but allowed them again a year after. This is going to happen again.

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

#186

Post by beaunative »

hef19898 wrote: post #149
hinkley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis resiliency mostly pays off when there's a crisis. You can reduce latency in systems by sourcing things closer to use, but having a fallback farther away. It's a tradeoff though. If I have two suppliers, the odds that I have 'a supplier issue' are doubled. But the odds that I have no supply at all is lower.

Two suppliers are more resilient so, you always have a fall back. Suppliers run into trouble all the time, single sources screw you in that case. Cluster risks are always bad.

Unfortunately you can't just spin supplies up as if they are in AWS EC2 zone. It takes years to built if they weren't already there. The more apprioriate comparison would be to have a home-hosted server cluster in addition to EC2 cluster which most companies simply don't do. It's just too expensive.

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

#187

Post by beaunative »

listsfrin wrote: post #13
bdcravens wrote: post #7

I had a phone stolen a couple of weeks ago, and initially I was trying to buy a new phone outright (ended up filing a claim and having my new one overnighted, but lack of SMS access would have prevented me from doing my job, hence the urgency). None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain), but Best Buy did.

I waited a whole month for a Macbook Pro with 256 RAM. Before the "crisis". The apocalypse is near.

Having to waiting for a fancy laptop to arrive is hardly "the apocalyps". It's what people used to do.

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

#188

Post by b1ur »

save_ferris wrote: post #184
_bxg1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How many whistle-blowers trying to alert the public to this disease did the US government throw in prison?

eh, the US doesn't exactly have the greatest track record on whistleblowers...

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

#189

Post by _bxg1 »

philtable wrote: post #185
_bxg1 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They created this crisis by silencing whistleblowers and hiding case numbers. Don't forget they banned wildlife markets during SARS, but allowed them again a year after. This is going to happen again.

Sure, but the U.S. is actively discouraging/thwarting testing efforts, because ~the economy~. And our chief executive is disseminating misinformation (whether out of ignorance or ulterior motives is unclear).

I'm not saying China did a great job. But they seem to have gotten a handle on things at least, meanwhile we've yet to even really start preparing. And we have the advantage of hindsight, which they didn't have.

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

#190

Post by glofish »

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…

the average price of a house in 1959 was $10K for a disposable income o $351 (3.5%)

the average price of a house in 2020 is $270K for a disposable income of $16K (5.9%)

We have larger disposable income but the difference is not nearly as substantial as these other measures show. I do think that we earn more overall because we are more productive than back then.

Post reply on HN