Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
201–210 of 690 posts
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#202What comes to mind is The Big Short. That is, following the herd - to the point of negligence - is an advantage, until it's not. Where and when did Wall Street and Finance get the reputation as geniuses? What's so genius about rubber stamping herd mentality ideas?
That aside, have there been any winners? Companies or industries that were less RoE driven? Or does the economy completely lack "bio" diversity?
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#203He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#204He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
That part of the Twitter thread actually made me laugh out loud. In the middle of talking about how modern finance is messed up he has a kind of unprompted little aside about how “taxes are bad!!!”
Dear lord the amount of smug “wE aRe ThE mOSt EfFicIEnt wAY Of AllOCaTinG CaPitAl” arguments from very wealthy founders that would prefer to become more wealthy is frankly ridiculous. I get it, you went to Stanford and they taught you some fancy words to trick people into giving you money instead of investing in public infrastructure and services.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#205He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
>Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand.
You do realize when we talk about jeff bezos being a billionaire, it doesn't mean he has his billions in gold/cash in a vault somewhere? The overwhelming majority of his wealth is tied in various financial assets (eg. equities) that certainly do get affected when "businesses go into shock". Sure, he'll be in a much better position to weather such "shocks", but it's still in his best interest to ensure that the economy doesn't crash.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#206He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
>> He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money.
He didn't say they'd solve the problem. He said they're the only ones who can be resilient in hard times. OK I think he said the ARE resilient, I say "can be" because it's still a choice.
"I think economists call it rent-seeking." That's what the incumbents are after, and so are a lot of the startups - at least the startups seeking round after round of investment. If they're not seeking rent, they're trying to set up infrastructure (manufacturing or cloud this-or-that) and collecting returns (rent) on that investment. Nobody talks about profit on goods sold, they talk about return on capital (or RoE) and that seems a lot more like rent.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#207I worked at a company who made products on contract, but the contract stipulated the vendor we had to use to get the raw materials. The raw materials were just aluminum castings, but they were a custom shape specifically for this customer of ours. They could only be used for this one product.
I noticed that the inventory levels of our vendor were dropping, but we weren't buying. Meaning our customer was ordering the same product from a competitor.
I proposed that we spend the money to buy the rest of the material at the vendor. Basically denying our competitor the materials and forcing either them to come to us or the customer dropping the order and reordering through us. This would have been a risk because that's about a year supply of proprietary castings that we can't use for anything else, but I really thought it was a worthwhile opportunity. But it went against lean principles so we didn't do it.
Fast forward 6 months and our competitor basically did the same thing to us.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#208He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…
Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…
> Switzerfy the economy
Just off the top of my head, the Swiss:
don't make airplanes (no Boeing, Embraer)
don't make cars (no GM, Ford, Toyota, etc)
have big consolidated banks (UBS & CS)
have large trading firms (Glencore, Trafigura)
etc....
My point is not to nitpick (I actually agree with your post) , but to show that even in a tiny country like Switzerland (smaller than Chicago), it is hard to do that.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#209I like the way how he explains how I still have more stuff available to me during a fucking global pandemic than my parents ever had in normal times, let alone the grands but it's still a troubling "supply chain bottleneck" that's about three letter acronyms something something.
I think it's a good test run for a time of war, or ultra serious pandemics. And we did fucking well. Also a good thing to bring up the next time some trashy moron talks about how on Twitter they read about oversupply of food in the West and how it's bad.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#210No, no, no! Stockpiling is not a solution to a bottleneck! In the grand scheme of things, having a couple weeks of extra inventory on hand will not help you weather a 100 year storm. But it will increase waste - inventory that you have to throw away when there are defects or when they become obsolete. Imagine trying to predict the run on lumber, and the solution was to have kept a bunch of lumber sitting in yards rot…
Even if you are right, what would be your solution?
I mean, the problem is not that we lack transparency, but that we have run out of options to fight the bottlenecks. Having some stockpiles as buffers would be one options to fight the problem.