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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

#191
Yesterday I had this couple who do pool servicing out to look at some issues with our swimming pool. They told me their usual salt supplier has run out of salt. The salt supplier usually imports salt from China (to Australia), but the supplier has a shipping container full of salt they've ordered stuck in China and not sure when it will actually make it to Australia.

(They explained domestic Australian-made salt is still available, but it is 30% more expensive than the Chinese import salt.)

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

#192

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 funneling uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace mig…

How did China "sabotage" Italy & South Korea? Italy & South Korea had ample time to ban travel to & from China, given how China was handling Coronavirus. They chose not to. China is free to make decisions handing an epidemic. We are free to criticize how they handle it. We were free to implement travel restrictions. We chose not to. China didn't strike us with a bioweapon. We did nothing to stop a novel virus from sp…

And people still think it's a flu, going out as normal..

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

#193
post #169

"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.

By imposing a draconian lock down on all citizens (even those who havent tested positive)? I guess...

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if companies start thinking about their supplier base just now, well that's just too late. I can only comment on physical supply chains, so. But even there building up suppliers takes time and money. Personally, I would love to see the risk of single sources be valued higher in the equations. One can dream, right?

Edit: Now I got the cluster thing. I meant cluster in the sense of risk, meaning you have a single point of failure and high degree of risk concentration. But your point is really interesting, I never thought about these aspects of cloud computing.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, they could have permanently banned wet markets. Every epidemiologist knew that something like this pandemic was eventually inevitable China absolutely could have prevented this but there wasn't a desire to do so because CCP officials like to eat bats sometimes too

There is absolutely no proof that this originated with someone eating bats. Bats often life close to humans—in attics for instance—and aren’t eaten raw. That makes it far more likely initial transmission was due to someone accidentally touching bat shit than anyone eating bats. That this theory is widely being accepted as proven fact is itself evidence of the accusation of racism you’re trying to defend against.

Source on this please? You're right that it likely wasn't bats but scientists think it may have been in snakes or Pangolins

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51496830

But there seems to be a consensus that this bug started in their wetmarket. I don't care if it was consumption of the animal or from fecal matter. Wetmarkets should be permanently banned. Wealthy CCP cadre members didn't want to do this and it cost the world big time

Also, racism? When did I bring that up?

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

#196
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It does when "whistleblower" means "independent person publishing data from independent sources".

The US has a crappy record on people who leak government data, but that's an entirely different thing.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly you're coming off far more extremist than OP is. OP's just arguing that in times of strife, we could potentially suffer because of a lack of self-reliance. He has a valid point, and should another even worse and longer lasting zoonotic(or any kind) disease spur up again, do you honestly think it's a good idea to make no steps towards developing emergency self-reliance systems in case of catastrophe? What abo…

The entire philosophy around open markets and globalization is that you don't need "self reliance" because it's one giant market that shares goals and interdependence.

I've never, ever heard globalization described that way. Globalization has always been about allowing the market to seek the lowest cost production locations and with free movement of goods this means the global (assumed to be homogeneous) consumer gets the cheapest prices possible for their basket. What you're describing is more akin to a network of bilateral trade agreements.

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

#198

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.

I think you probably want to hold off your decision till this ends, moving out of China to be more resilient only works if You can be sure the country you are moving to won’t have the same issue

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain) That may be true...but it may be just as likely they are minimizing their own inventory to keep their own costs down/cash on hand, which is not something they would freely tell their own employees or customers.

I've heard that new Apple employees aren't getting any equipment because they don't have any to give. I ordered an Apple watch on March 3rd and it won't arrive until March 24th. I'm pretty sure they are having serious supply chain issues.

Everybody has. There is Chinese New Year, always surprising companies exporting from China every year like Christmas, and than at the same time Corona. Now there is a huge backlog of produced goods in Chinese ports, a huge order backlog at Chinese manufacturers amyd not enough shipping and production capacity. Ultimately things will revert to normal, so. That Corona is now hitting the destinations of these backlogs doesn't help, obviously.

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

#200
post #169

"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.

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

"seem" being the operative word. You only know what the CCP wants you to know.

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