Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 690 posts

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#221

Post by caust1c »

evilotto wrote: post #33

He'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…

Yeah, this guy has clearly read about the theory of constraints but his pivot into criticizing the wealth tax on the basis "founders will lose control of their company" is simply bullshit.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#223

Post by SkittyDog »

vanattab wrote: post #179
SkittyDog wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the terms "economic rent" and "rent seeking", the concept of rent is not specific to assets. Rent paid to landowners was the original inspiration for the terminology, but in actual usage it refers to any economic behavior that extracts value without creating new value. • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Notably, this usage does not include "providing liquidity", so most of what hedge funds and private…

Unless you consider liquidity to be valuable? No?

It's not about whether something is immediately valuae to somebody... It's about whether the total net effect on society produces new value, or if it's just shifting value from someone to another. Per the overwhelming opinion of economists, providing liquidity is rent seeking, because the benefit it provides to one person is exactly offset by the value it takes away from someone else.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#224

Post by legutierr »

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…

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics.

One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global integration was promoted and pursued in the first place by many policy makers—in order to make such wars less likely to occur.

I suppose the thinking was that the obvious downside—that if a great-power war were to occur, the global economy would be in shambles—was irrelevant given that another world war would likely amount to Armageddon.

In other words, preparing for the contingency of a world war is worse than useless, because the only viable path (both from a utilitarian and from a moral perspective) is to do what is most effective to prevent the occurrence of such a war (which pursuant to this line of thinking includes, of course, making significant investments in defense).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#226

Post by tuatoru »

ben_w wrote: post #157
kqr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I can believe a pandemic might cause a global economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or the Great Recession, but I my imagination isn’t giving me any ideas how the latter might cause the former?

... poverty causes a rise in consumption of bush meat, like bats in Wuhan[1] or primates in central Africa[2]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#227

Post by gruez »

philwelch wrote: post #139
mfer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. I count 13 global pandemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology

what's your methodology? The linked section includes stuff like the "2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic", which was "worldwide" but had a death toll of 53 people. Should that be considered a pandemic? If we go with the "Epidemics and pandemics with at least 1 million deaths" table, there's only 6 worldwide pandemics.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#228

Post by marginalia_nu »

dragontamer wrote: post #194
marginalia_nu wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at the same time, Factorio teaches you that you need some buffers to build a fault tolerant factory. Factorio often has implicit buffers through its belts (or bot network). If you build an inserter-only factory you'll become painfully aware how important they are to to the smooth operation of the factory. Otherwise it's very easy to get rolling waves of cascading backpressure, where the entire factory is only ab…

That's a throughput problem. Inserters have 1/20th the throughput of a belt. When you go truly just in time _WITH_ good throughput (aka: Logistic Bots), its so effective that a huge subset of the community thinks that its cheating. Leaving 1000 items on a belt (aka: a belt of length 70) is just less effective than bots flying to fetch an item _just_ when you need it. The buffer is counter-productive. ------- The only…

Bots still buffer items. Bot based factories produce when those buffers are low, not strictly when items are needed.

A true on-demand factory would take ages to produce anything, it would basically not be much faster than handcrafting because the iron plates wouldn't start being created until the pipe is needed, and the pipe wouldn't be needed until the steam engine is needed. But it's much slower to make iron plates than pipes, and much slower to make 10 pipes than make a steam engine. Which is why you absolutely need those buffers.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#229

Post by intricatedetail »

In my country mostly legislation that taxes small business on revenue even over 50% effective rate and prevents from claiming legitimate business expenses. That wiped off thousands of HGV drivers working through their own small business. They got also smeared by the government as tax dodgers without showing any proof that this was ever the case. They of course blamed that on Brexit.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#230

Post by lupire »

xyzzyz wrote: post #198
ladyattis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Billionaires have relatively very little cash in hand. Their billions typically are in form of business equity, and so they very much care of the businesses go into shock.

Billionaires have massive personal loans (compared to human needs, not compatrd do their owned equity) collateralized by their business equity.
Post reply on HN