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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#471

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

ikiris wrote: post #449
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #387

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…

its not bad luck when you buy something thats only made one place on the planet.

Many, if not most, chips (by part number) are fabricated in one fab on the planet. It’s not possible to design a product with dual sources for every chip. This is particularly the case with older designs that are on the sustaining end of their life cycle. In some cases, a part # is run once a year, in one fab on the planet.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#476

Post by stainforth »

chii wrote: post #459
stainforth wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B) Buyers are not willing actors

Why is that? they arent forced to "buy" at gunpoint.

I mean in the sense of certain goods, like one needs to physically survive. And also the things for your business to survive.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#477

Post by chii »

andrekandre wrote: post #408
legutierr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. i wonder what the recent resurgence of nationalism and "us vs them" thinking plays into this... is it possible that our global economic system, international relations etc are not yet evolved eno…

For such a system to function, there must be one superpower, rather than two.

The US has clearly emerged as the one superpower in the aftermath of the soviet dissolution. But China has now emerged as a potential competitor to the superpower status (they've basically replaced the soviets in this model). They haven't yet reached the same level, but will soon according to all modeling and prediction.

I do believe that it is the US's hope, in the clinton administration, to have china's market economy open up, and thus, allow western "democratic" culture seep in (ala, like japan and korea - but without having a war to start with). This certainly, and clearly has failed now. China do not want to be "subservient" to the US superpower like the other westernized asian nations.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#478

Post by chii »

joe_the_user wrote: post #145
cmenge wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? I would have voted for a party with a program of "bring the manufacture of strategically crucial items back to the US and make it robust". This seems like it would even be Republican "bread and butter" and I don't see why either party had an issue with it.

How you label or market a subsidy doesn't change it to not be a subsidy.

i think a lot of people would not want such a subsidy.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#479

Post by quadrangle »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #462
InitialLastName wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re. paper towels: strictly non-essential items, yes, but it takes some lifestyle reconfiguration to make the alternatives work. My household is (I speculate asymptotically) approaching zero paper towel use, but we have ready access to laundry, the capital and bandwidth to have built up a comfortable supply of rags and towels, and our only occasionally messy coinhabitant is the cat (and you can bet that if he vomits,…

The whole point of paper towels, or disposable nappies, is removing the labour cost of cleaning them. My ex-wife was a stay at home Mom for her religious reasons, and was determined to be the "best" Mom, only healthy food, no TV or devices, cloth nappies etc. Once we hit kid #3, the time needed to launder cloth nappies wasn't viable with two other kids on the go. I encouraged her to give disposables a go, and she was…

Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently.

We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine.

Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper goes in the pail.

We also did "elmination communication" part-time. Just literally set the kid over the potty around the right amount of time after eating, and each time we take diaper off, and if it looks like they're about to go. It wasn't lots of extra work, and around 6-months, we had maybe half the times just going in the potty without needing to deal with a dirty diaper at all.

The entire problem is that our society is set up for the disposable approach and you rarely even know anyone in person who can guide you through managing it better, so we all figure it out for ourselves using the internet. But like, the one other family we told about what we were doing it just followed our lead and had total success too. And kids end up fully potty trained before 2yo.

It takes more than just good intentions, it takes sharing the wisdom more. Companies that profit off of a disposable economy work to get attention instead of the better wisdom we could be sharing with one another.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#480

Post by dragontamer »

mindslight wrote: post #412
dragontamer wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proposing we cut off Hospital / school funding to make our mega-dense utopia with maximum tax $$$$ per population here. (Yes, I too have played lots of Sim City. I'm well aware of the unrealistic corners of the game). I'm simply pointing out that Factorio has a factory-like system that has the "buffering" problem innate to the game mechanics. As far as I can tell, the problem of buffering in real life is clos…

I'm making the general point that results from optimizing for any model are going to depend entirely on the assumptions baked into the model. I haven't played Factorio, but based on your description it sounds like it leaves out price signals because the player has omniscience. If a supply chain is directed by a centralized entity, then yes, keeping intermediate inventory doesn't do much. But our actual economy is bas…

In Factorio, the part where the human "interacts" with the factory is given a name, called "The Mall". (You ship all of the products that the human intends to use to a central location).

You do have a nominal amount of supplies buffered up in the mall, but only as much as you ever expect the human (ie: yourself) to ever use at any given time.

Let me discuss the Belt hiearchy. Belts are used to move items around the factory, but are used relatively unpredictably.

Iron makes gears. Iron + Gears make Yellow Belts (slow). Yellow belts + Gears make Red Belts. Red Belts + Lubricant + Gears make Blue belts (fastest belts).

Lets say you're at endgame, so you'll only be using blue belts (very expensive, but useful to the human to have fewer "SKUs" so to speak to think about. Yellow/Red belts save on material but blue belts are best, so you end up just "eating the cost" in most cases).

There's really only one item you should buffer: blue belts. All other components (gears, yellow-belts, red belts, and lubrican) should be made on a "just in time", 0-buffer solution if at all possible.

Yellow-belts and Gears are furthermore used in other items: such as underground belts, splitters (for belts), or inserters / assembly machines / automated turrets (gears). Buffering up gears "at your belt factory" starves your other factories (ie: buffering up 1000 gears at the belt-factory means that your turret-factory will be starved and idle)

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