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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#381

Post by ilammy »

doopy1 wrote: post #319
throw0101a wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos does not have his cash in hand, for the most part. To the extent that he does have cash in hand, he has already paid taxes on that cash. What a lot of high wealthy individuals are doing is using their portfolios as collateral against lines of credit. The LOCs give them cash to fund their lifestyle, and they don't have to liquidate their portfolios and take the capital gains charges (at least in the short-term…

Don't they have to payback the loans at some point? And at that point do they not liquidate some assets to do so and pay taxes on that? (Serious question.)

You don't use all your assets as a collateral – you loan out, say, 1%, for the needs you have. If the creditor demands a repayment for some reason – and if you're still solvent, it's not like your IOU can't be treated as money in itself – then you can get a loan on some other 1% of your now-appreciated assets, use that to repay the first loan. All without liquidating any assets and accruing any “income”. Then pass the bucket to whoever inherits your assets.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#382

Post by unethical_ban »

dragontamer wrote: post #154

Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.

In real life, one could build dashboards to measure and alert on rates of buffer depletion to anticipate and fix bottlenecks before the buffer runs out.

In factorio, setting up some cable, chest readers and an alarm - but Factorio unmodded can't alert on rate of chest depletion IIRC.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#383

Post by panarky »

darawk wrote: post #337
throw0101a wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos does not have his cash in hand, for the most part. To the extent that he does have cash in hand, he has already paid taxes on that cash. What a lot of high wealthy individuals are doing is using their portfolios as collateral against lines of credit. The LOCs give them cash to fund their lifestyle, and they don't have to liquidate their portfolios and take the capital gains charges (at least in the short-term…

> What a lot of high wealthy individuals are doing is using their portfolios as collateral against lines of credit. The LOCs give them cash to fund their lifestyle, and they don't have to liquidate their portfolios and take the capital gains charges (at least in the short-term). > Someone can have both holdings and cash in this situation. Ya, I understand this. This is exactly my point, though. If he's taken out loan…

For a billionaire it's not about the absolute dollar value of their wealth.

It's about the fraction of global wealth that they control.

That's how they benefit from crisis and catastrophe.

Maybe the dollar value of their pile declines, but the percentage of global wealth they control increases, as the poor and less wealthy get hurt proportionately more.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#384

Post by micromacrofoot »

darawk wrote: post #333
micromacrofoot wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m willing to bet he has more cash on hand than we will make in our entire lifetimes… what’s the point of arguing how much it is? the point is that he has so much money that nothing really matters.

The point is exactly what I said in the rest of the comment. He has already paid taxes on the cash he has in hand. The only assets he has not paid taxes on are the shares in AMZN that he has not realized the gains on.

sure but he’s got so much he has no incentive to touch it, and it gains all the same… if he makes a 5% return this year, take 2%…

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#385

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#386

Post by dragontamer »

unethical_ban wrote: post #382
dragontamer wrote: post #154

Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.

In real life, one could build dashboards to measure and alert on rates of buffer depletion to anticipate and fix bottlenecks before the buffer runs out. In factorio, setting up some cable, chest readers and an alarm - but Factorio unmodded can't alert on rate of chest depletion IIRC.

> In factorio, setting up some cable, chest readers and an alarm - but Factorio unmodded can't alert on rate of chest depletion IIRC.

Unmodded can do it for sure. All you need is a clock and a divisor circuit.

Clock circuits are a constant circuit (+1) applied to a flip-flop, so that the flip-flop counts +1 per tick. (+60 per second).

With a second flip-flop circuit, you can read-and-save the looping time. You subtract the saved time from the current clock to see how much time has passed.

You have a 3rd flip-flop save the value of the chest, and calculate (chest - (flip-flop of chest) / (current-clock - saved-clock)).

Blast that value onto a decider circuit (X > Y) hooked up to a simple alarm. Bam. Fully vanilla factorio solution.

-----------

I may have played this game too long...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#387

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

On the other hand, sometimes, it's straight ahead bad luck.

A chip we use in one of our products is made in a semiconductor fab in Malaysia. It's the only place in the world that makes the chip. That fab has been shut down for about 6 months as the nation struggles with COVID. In the meantime, the inventory in the supply chain, and even customer warehouses, has been picked clean by brokers to be re-sold for high-cost applications like cars and industrial equipment.

We've paid as much as $15.00 for that $0.47 chip. One broker offered them for $50.00.

We haven't found any in more than 2 months.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#389

Post by panarky »

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…

The problem isn't RoE itself, it's the focus on short-term RoE.

You can juice RoE in the short term by removing slack and shock absorbers, because increasing the brittleness of the supply chain probably won't show up in this quarter's returns.

The supply chain for fuel is brittle. There isn't sufficient inventory in tanks to buffer even short disruptions. A pipeline offline for a couple days is enough to make a crisis.

People catch wind of the crisis and start filling their tanks at three-quarters full instead of one-quarter full, and the brittle supply chain breaks with the accelerated demand.

Same thing we're seeing with the global supply chain which was already brittle, now individuals and companies are putting in bigger orders sooner to compensate, and it fails in the face of accelerated demand.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#390

Post by jen20 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #96
whatever1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“cause reduced private ownership of large companies, resulting in a reduced ability to handle 100-year flood events.” How the market speculation on the value of a company can affect its resiliency ? If tomorrow everyone sold Apple stock for 1 cent, why would Apple the company care ? Same revenue, same costs. Give me a break with the importance of the stock casino.

It would impact Apple's ability to raise money on the stock market tho.

It would also mean Apple have to radically restructure the compensation of many of their corporate employees to remain competitive.
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