The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

I get it. Chinese vendors are not as reliable as Western suppliers. But it's not like ICs are black magic, it certainly wouldn't be that to enforce third-party quality control on them. Sure every now and then you'll pay for a batch you gotta throw out. But that sure as hell beats business killing 52-week lead times.

I tend to react badly to broad-brush painting of business and those who run them as greedy and evil. There is a cultural undertone that seems to think this way. I can't understand how this happens other than to think that people who think this way (broad characterization) simply don't engage in any critical thinking at all and don't understand business.

The vast majority of businesses, large and small, are comprised of honest hard-working people who have no ill intent of any kind. The percentage has to be in the high 9's, like 99.999%. If this were not the case it would be very evident.

Large corporations can behave badly due to the power they can wield. A simple example of this are companies that have entire floors full of attorneys and can muscle little guys into submission by simply being able to outspend them in legal jousting. I have been at the receiving end of this and it is nasty. You are entirely powerless and can't do a thing about you. The asymmetry is beyond evident and, yes, very much unfair.

This, in my opinion, is a structural failure of our legal system. I am not a lawyer, so I can't really dissect this down to details. I just think that "equal under the law" depend on how much money you have to tilt that equality. I don't know what could be changed in order to achieve balance.

A simple example of this could be patents. A good utility patent can cost in the order of $25K to $50K to secure and take years. A large company has the resources to write hundreds of patents per year. Small to medium businesses are generally more innovative and creative than large organizations with lots of inertia. However, they are often starved for cash, which means they have to choose between innovating, paying the bills, keeping people employed and existing or dumping cash into patent after patent. This creates a situation where small to medium businesses end-up living in a very real legal mine field of patents that could, at any time, take them out. Beyond that, patent litigation --any litigation-- is so expensive that almost anyone has to cave immediately.

Yes, we could do a lot better in ensuring fairness and socially responsible behavior across the board. Not sure how we get there when our political system's fitness function is completely disconnected from delivering anything of true value to society. As long as politicians are evaluated through a fitness function with that consists of votes and not much else, we are not going to have leadership who cares about doing anything other than lying and pandering for votes. How do we fix anything when these are the kinds of people running the nation?

One of the things I have grown fond of forcing myself to say or think as a way to center myself is that reality can't be reduced to a single variable. Reality is a complex multivariate problem. As such, a reduction to a single variable, is both irrational and unrealistic. No matter the issue, there's a lot more under the surface than a single variable, issue, property, behavior, etc. A lot more. The sophisticated thinker will recognize this and try their best to avoid the kinds of sweeping generalizations that are, sadly, so common these days. Entire groups of people negatively painted with a broad brush is probably the most recognizable for of this effect today.