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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#231

Post by matwood »

nimbius wrote: post #58

I can speak from a trucking perspective. it was a cascade failure for professional drivers. when covid first hit, supply chains either had too much or too little almost instantly. Things like raw supplies based on JIT ordering either ground to a halt because demand died and so did the modelling, or because demand was too high for the computer model (think a bell curve.) low-boy trucks shipping things like constructio…

> Sheboygan that went out of business eight minutes ago due to shipping

Even before covid I used to read about consumer companies that have a shipping problem right before Christmas and go out of business. So I can believe that shipping problems on a scale this large will take time to fix. Thank you for your comment.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#232

Post by jonny_eh »

paganel wrote: post #188
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…

> I think economists call it rent-seeking. There was a book published a couple of years ago (before the pandemic) which was "demonstrating" (so to speak) that going back through history real financial/economic levelling at a reasonable scale only happened as a result of violent means (wars, revolutions etc). I think what those violent means do (among other, more nasty things like people getting killed) is that (in so…

> violent means (wars, revolutions etc).

Also plagues/disease. Currently relevant.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#233

Post by TAForObvReasons »

gruez wrote: post #218
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…

> 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 profit for themselves. >I think economists call it rent-seeking. Are you saying all "disruptive innovation" rent-seeking? Or only certain kinds? If a founder was able to "optimize the excess out of the system" by provid…

There are genuine "disruptive innovations" that are not rent seeking, but by and large that is not what we've seen.

Picking on Amazon for a moment, their original "innovation" was a sales and use tax dodge: based in Washington, they were able to sell books to California without having to charge the relevant sales tax upfront. That margin gave huge room to provide free shipping and other customer conveniences. Technically customers were supposed to pay a self-reported use tax but many did not.

The relevant laws have changed since then, but the general point still stands. Does mere tax and legal arbitrage count as rent-seeking? Absolutely.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#234

Post by rsj_hn »

intricatedetail wrote: post #229

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.

That's interesting -- do you have a link for some background information?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#236

Post by dragontamer »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #228
dragontamer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just in time doesn't mean "buffer free". It means eliminating unnecessary buffers.

When Ford ran out of chips (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/ford-slashes-vehicle-product...) because of its "just-in-time" process, Ford was able to give 2-months of notice before shutting down one of its lines.

That means that Ford had a 2-month buffer __in practice__.

----------

When you go bot-based, you have full control over the size of your buffers at all steps of your Factorio design. At that point, you realize that smaller buffers are more efficient, and that larger-buffers don't do anything.

Ex: if you achieve maximum throughput with buffer-size 20, you leave it at 20-sized buffers. There's no reason to buffer-up 1000x items when 20-sized buffers work out fine.

---------

Belts force you to buffer everywhere... and proportionally to the size of the belt. A long belt 1000 tiles long would force you to buffer up 7000 (one side) or 14,000 items (double-sided). The size of these buffers are grossly larger than what anyone needs.

The key buffer size is usually 12 (the stack-inserter's grab size). Maybe 24 or 36 so that you have enough buffering to handle 2 or 3 swings of the stack inserter in case those items don't arrive on time (bots "seemingly randomly" run out of power, from the perspective of that assembly machine)... but anything more than that is redundant. Buffer size 50 (minimum size allowed on chests) are used in practice.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#237

Post by tuatoru »

dzonga wrote: post #183
Consultant32452 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

as someone originally from a 3rd world country. I can truly say never trust what the UN or any of those big NGO's say. It's propaganda pushing a narrative. what causes starvation in most poorer parts of the world are western induced climate change i.e draughts, floods etc. Then of course political instability

Indeed, rural people in less-developed countries are hardly connected to global trade at all.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#238

Post by CamperBob2 »

greendesk wrote: post #211
joe_the_user wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprep…

I have a tidbit on the following: >> we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. But just a tidbit on this statement.

There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious.

That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it.

That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be.

And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#239

Post by chernevik »

Lean manufacturing isn't just about minimizing book inventory and cash tied in inventory. It helps keep production flexible and responsive, and helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. And it reduces risk -- a car manufacturer holding several months of chips is going to lose that investment every time its chip stock gets obsoleted.

I expect that increasing buffers of material work in progress to levels indifferent to the current mess would be very expensive, very risky and have all sorts of secondary effects.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#240

Post by JaimeThompson »

hosteur wrote: post #36
Afforess wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TX Winter Storm and Big Freeze did more damage to the TX economy than the shutdowns. Try again.

That’s not a good argument. 1: damage done by shutdowns is still going on so we don’t even know the full cost. 2: the winter storm is not self inflicted. 3: I am not sure you are right that said winter storm did more damage. Would like a source though.

Gas producers not having themselves marked as critical infrastructure so ERCOT would not kill power to them and the failure of plants to winterize themselves are self-inflicted.
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