What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? • Hacker News Board

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#81

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

flurie wrote: post #45

The 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,…

Well, publicly owned companies have, in the last 20+ years, been very bad at keeping spare capacity around. Lots of "rationalizations" and "rightsizing" and so on have cut all the reserves.

That said, this does read like someone with a personal axe to grind, leading to motivated reasoning.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#82

Post by cmenge » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

mfer wrote: post #60

cmenge wrote: post #11

Hm, 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…

> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply c…

> The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries.

I think that is the point (or one of the points): it's not just logistics and spare capacity - it's a much more complex set of issues.

This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve, as seems to be implied in the Twitter thread.

Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#83

Post by patrickyeon » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

> Only founder led companies and family owned businesses can stand up to the immense pressure from the dogmas of modern finance.

How about worker-owned companies, co-operatives, and collectives? I totally agree the problem is that with the finance people steering the ship there's incentives to push up your short-term performance and collect bonuses and watch your publically-traded stock value go up. So don't go public; use the value an organization creates to pay the people in it, and invest in making it better for those people and the people you serve. The people who have say in the decisions are the ones who are most interested in having the organization continue to be healthy and a good place to work.

There are other ways. We don't even need to imagine them, they've already happened. We just need to resist the siren song of the lottery ticket and instead try to create systems and organizations that we want to be a part of.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#84

Post by MisterBastahrd » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

rajin444 wrote: post #65

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Sweden? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

That's not a fair comparison. Most covid deaths are from those already past the average life expectancy. There's a very good chance they were going to die soon anyways. Not to mention you have to account for cancer patient + covid, etc. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...

It's completely fair. There's always a cause of death, and averages aren't indicative of individual cases. If an old person gets shot by a gun tomorrow, we don't chalk that up as "well, they had their time."

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#85

Post by ltbarcly3 » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

Where are the bottlenecks? I see that things are in low supply and sold out, but when I look at specific things (say cpus or complete computers) I see increasing and record numbers of units delivered.

Runaway inflation looks like a supply problem at first, as shelves are emptied by the huge amount of money in the economy chasing the goods available. The price increases are a supply side response to demand being higher than can be supply can keep up with.

Please feel free to downvote this and insist that inflation is a myth as is usual on HN.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#86

Post by erosenbe0 » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #19

That’s just finger waving. The main cause is the madness of the situation where a deadly global pandemic causes the money supply to increase across all sectors. If you were a manufacturer in March 2020, the only responsible thing was to reduce operations to the bare minimum. Add lockdowns and changing, unpredictable consumption patterns (e.g buying more cars against all predictions because who wants public transport…

Correct. The Fed is holding huge amounts of assets artificially boosting stocks and both corporate and govt. investment, creating a housing bubble and wealth inequality as a tradeoff to keep unemployment low. Combined with the government 'stimulus.' School districts and municipalities with millions to spend for several years into the future.

Why would we expect there to be a perfect equilibrium immediately?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#87

Post by kqr » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #59

ben_w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, once a century refers to average, it is by no means a guarantee that it will be a century before the next crisis.

To be even more fair, there's absolutely no reason to think these types of events are independent; there's good reason to believe they're positively correlated. This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened. (But if you're lucky and it doesn't happen again the chances decrease further, giving you an average of 100 years between them again.)

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#88

Post by Consultant32452 » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

cmenge wrote: post #11

Hm, 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…

In wealthy countries like the US it might be harder to get that new XBox you wanted. In the rest of the world there's hundreds of millions of people who are starving to death.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-mi...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#89

Post by a-dub » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

opening titles and music

q: what caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

a: the pandemic.

cue outro

next week:

opening titles and music

q: should we have done anything differently?

a: probably not. that would be really expensive and pandemics are pretty rare.

cue outro

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#90

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

Dumblydorr wrote: post #15

Is Twitter the best place for such analyses? They're stream of consciousness sentences and paragraphs, not cohesive narrative essays.

When developing ideas, tootstorms offer some advantages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970983