Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people alive and not dead
Sweden
Their COVID death rate is 10x their neighbors, per capita. [1]
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
41–50 of 690 posts
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#42Is Twitter the best place for such analyses? They're stream of consciousness sentences and paragraphs, not cohesive narrative essays.
For articulated analyses of complex phenomena a Twitter thread is completely inadequate. For simplistic explanations whose objective is to promote an opinion it is great, because it makes it easy to re-share morsels of the argument.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#43It's a policy problem. Truth is hard to determine because the delays are the effect of upstream decisions. There were internet anecdotes about California port policy preventing drivers from picking up loads (allegedly the owner operator law changes that hit Uber also hit truck drivers as well), federal policy changes reducing the time drivers can spend at the ports and number of loads they can take each day, but it was hard to separate these from partisan criticisms, even if the problems seem to have appeared overnight. Covid was around all last year, and between the availability of vaccines and the number of cases in cities being in the low hundreds, it's not like people working on supply chains are suddenly home sick with it.
It's getting more challenging to not interpret the destruction of independent business (such as owner operators of trucks, retail, restaurants and bars, and other policies) as an intentional soft-dekulakization of western economies, which is a necessary step in an old playbook. It would be helpful toward demonstrating a better explanation if there were some other economic factor that has appeared in the last year that was not just clumsy application of policy.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#44Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
I really don't understand what you mean by this comment. The only swaths of the economy that I'm aware of that got shut down in the U.S. are things like bars, restaurants and movie theaters. These are not tightly connected to global supply chains, AFAIK, and if they were why would their shut down cause bottlenecks (it should lessen demand, not increase it)?
Tesla's California factory was shut down for 2 months.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#45The buried lede is an assertion that a tax on unrealized capital gains will cause reduced private ownership of large companies, resulting in a reduced ability to handle 100-year flood events.
Along the way, there are a bunch of other assertions that serve as prerequisites, like the idea that these companies can cultivate better employee loyalty and plan for longer horizons.
How much do we know about how true that is, though? Do privately-owned companies disproportionately survive these sorts of events historically?
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people alive and not dead
Sweden
This kind of comment is extremely unproductive.
The idea of Sweden has no connection at all to the topic at hand. You are using the word "Sweden" to make an argument because you believe the connection between Sweden and conversations about lockdowns is so clear that the mere mention of the word is enough to bring the entire argument into someone else's mind.
So, this demonstrates that you believe everybody reading this comment knows what you mean. Which in turn means you know your comment is adding nothing at all to the conversation.
To belabor the point, if the connection between Sweden and lockdowns was an entirely convincing argument then everybody reading your comment would already agree with you, and there would be no reason for you to remind people of the connection with this comment. Since that doesn't appear to be true, you believe your peers need to be reminded of this argument, some elaboration on your part seems to be in order!
Hacker News is a lovely community where you can learn from a large variety of people, each knowledgeable in their own particular domain. The more thoughtful and substantial we make our comments, the nicer a place it becomes for everybody else.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#47https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
after a very short period of time after a major disruption, there ceases to be a simple cause and the answer rapidly becomes "well, it's the gibbs phenomenon, it's gonna ring for a while now".
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#48Long story short: Big spike in demand in a very short period of time.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#49Hm, seems like a monocausal 'explanation' of a complex problem - or let's say a mere opinion with little background information. Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... So, yes, some problems may exist but I think we have witnessed a surprisingly resilient system, given how optimized everything is and how unprecedented the issue is. I don't know i…
If it was just one item, such as graphics cards, I wouldn’t be particularly concerned. The problem is it’s a bit of everything, a mere 11-ish years after the Great Recession, which was itself “supposed” to be a once-a-century economic catastrophe.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#50Or maybe attempting to shut down large swaths of world economy for an indefinite amount of time wasn’t such a good idea? In the timescale of months to years all business becomes “essential”. Sure shut it down for “just two weeks” but a year or more? What did people think would happen?
I really don't understand what you mean by this comment. The only swaths of the economy that I'm aware of that got shut down in the U.S. are things like bars, restaurants and movie theaters. These are not tightly connected to global supply chains, AFAIK, and if they were why would their shut down cause bottlenecks (it should lessen demand, not increase it)?
Thinking about it from the perspective of someone who thinks the shutdowns were net good but reviewing the comment in good faith:
Lessened demand in large sections of the economy can itself create shortages in the parts that take on the load or at least stress on the supply chain to redirect to those places now in extreme demand. Take restaurants for example, people didn't stop eating but vast swaths of food supply chains had to change pretty much overnight.
Then there is also the problem of the demand of certain things being highly uncertain, like cars towards the beginning.
Then there is the extreme induced demand on certain things like webcams, laptops, or other home electronics as everyone stays home. I'm sure that also isn't an easy overnight change to make and then swing back from since it was completely unplanned. I know the area I work immediately ran out of widgets based on orders of 10s of thousands instantly coming in and it has been backed up since that time to this day.
Finally during the initial portion of the pandemic lots of factories, both in the US and China, were getting shut down. China seemingly longer. When restaurants and whatnot started to open back up was about the time you saw those shutdowns stop happening too. So on top of the above concerns for the supply chain lots of non bars and movie theatres were also affected by shutdowns, just perhaps not as long.
May be more I'm missing but I don't think GP is an empty comment by any means.