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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#501

Post by allturtles »

zamadatix wrote: post #289
allturtles wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the problem with understanding what GP means is that 'the shutdowns' is a very hazy term. Implicit in the comment seems to be the idea that there was some small set of authority figures who decided to shut down the global economy and if only they hadn't done that things would be better. e.g., The induced demand from work from home you mention I wouldn't count as part of any 'shutdown' at all. It has been larg…

I'm not sure the comment is implicit of who did the shutdowns but even taking it as so the widget orders by the 10s of thousands I referenced were mostly public school systems receiving mandates and associated COVID relief funding to compl,y not private enterprises. Particularly younger grades weren't normally assigned personal hardware and not every child had internet access at home. Though like you say the private…

Sure, many (most?) schools went remote, but they didn't shut down, and they aren't really integrated into the "global economy."

It's certainly true that collectively, society pushed down in some places and things popped up in others, sometimes in obvious ways (going remote creates demand for laptops and cameras and office chairs) and sometimes in surprising ones (spiking rental car prices, yet internet providers were totally unfazed). I don't think "if only we hadn't been so foolish as to shutdown a large part of the global economy" is a useful or helpful way to think about these phenomena, though.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#502

Post by dragontamer »

leetcrew wrote: post #495
rytill wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an actual refutation though? Why does buffering perform better in real-world factories than the simulated ones in Factorio?

the short answer is the real world is a lot more complicated and random than factorio. factorio is pretty complex for a video game, but trivial compared to a real world supply chain. most of the game mechanics are deterministic, and latencies are measured in minutes rather than weeks. you can analytically solve for how much iron ore you will need in the next hour, what the optimal ratio of copper wire to plastic bar…

> factorio is pretty complex for a video game, but trivial compared to a real world supply chain.

But Factorio is more complicated than what can be typically described in say... the 470 posts in this topic thus far.

As such, Factorio is "closer to reality" than the discussion (at least, than the discussion without Factorio being used as a crutch).

I'm using Factorio to elevate the argument closer to reality. Rather than using a crappier hypothetical example in the abstract.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#504

Post by dragontamer »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #498
dragontamer wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens if something in the middle breaks and you don't have a buffer? What happens if there is no iron shortage but the steel furnace blows up? Aren't buffers important in such situations? Okay, lets have two factories that convert 5-iron into 1-steel (Factorio ratio): * "Buffer Factory": requiring 7000 steel to buffer up / 35000 iron before working at full capacity. * "JIT Factory" : requires 200 steel to bu…

Your initial example is not making an argument against buffers in the supply chain, but against large production runs requiring large inputs. In the context of logistics, I think of a buffer as a system that slowly fills up due to excess capacity greater than demand, which can be drawn down in times when demand exceeds production. You seem to be referring to a buffer as a process which requires large inputs to get st…

> You seem to be referring to a buffer as a process which requires large inputs to get start producing.

No.

> I think of a buffer as a system that slowly fills up due to excess capacity greater than demand, which can be drawn down in times when demand exceeds production.

Yes. That's what I mean.

The steel furnaces __use iron__. This means that during the buffering process, the steel furnaces are "saving up iron", and preventing the rest of your factory from using iron.

That is to say: the 35,000 iron you put into the steel furnace __COULD HAVE BEEN USED__ in the yellow-belt portion of your factory, and could have instead made 23333 yellow belts.

--------

Its not worthwhile to save up 7000 steel (aka: 35,000 effective iron) when that iron could have been used to make _OTHER_ parts of your factory do important things.

-----

It doesn't matter if you "buffer up" that 35,000 iron slowly, quickly, all at once or over anything. Any such buffering means your "steel portion" has arbitrarily decided that the iron should be saved here, in a box unused. While shortages propagate outward to all the other parts of your Factorio where you __COULD__ have been using the iron instead.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#505

Post by dragontamer »

leetcrew wrote: post #490
dragontamer wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just in time doesn't mean "buffer free". It means eliminating unnecessary buffers. this is sort of tautological, or at least hinges on how you interpret "necessary". certainly no one would implement a buffer knowing at the time that it was unnecessary! but even in factorio, it can be worth maintaining a buffer deeper than what's needed to keep the factory running at 100% under optimal conditions. you don't want to…

> you don't want to find out that you're out of stone when your bots stop autoreplacing your walls and the biters flood in

But stone is used in more than just walls. You also use stone to make concrete.

So what do you buffer? Do you buffer stone? Cause buffering stone didn't actually solve anything (your "stone reserves" are the mine itself. If you really wanted to see "how good" your reserves are, you check how many stone mines you have left).

Do you buffer concrete? No. That wastes stone unnecessarily. Maybe you need the stone for the biter attack.

Do you buffer walls? No. That wastes stone. Maybe you need the stone to make concrete.

--------

So here's our 4 potential buffers:

* Buffer Stone -- Inferior to just running by your stone mines every few minutes and checking to see how many stone is left in the mine. The __MINES__ itself are your buffer.

* Buffer Concrete -- Wastes walls.

* Buffer Walls -- Wastes concrete.

* Buffer Concrete AND Walls -- Wastes furnaces, pumpjacks, and oil refineries. All of which require stone to make (and can't be made out of Concrete or Walls).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#506

Post by monocasa »

typ wrote: post #475

I thought maximizing ROE is rather 'old-school' nowadays. Most businesses I know tend to strive for growing market share and revenue. They are even willing to run the business in the red for that.

I've only seen that in businesses without inventory in the first place.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#507

Post by whatever1 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #489
whatever1 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Also, you'd have to provide a tax shield for the losses as well.” Not really. My car is losing 10% of its value each year but nobody is returning me the sales tax I paid for the full price. Let alone returning me some of lost value. Why if your stock depreciates do I have to compensate you?

Say you bought a vintage car -- do you have to pay more sales tax each time the car appreciates? I know some owners of FJ Cruisers that would be pretty upset.

Depends on what you decide on the question I asked.

Personally I believe that your claimed cars value is speculative since you don’t mass produce and sell it widely. As a result, it makes no sense to tax you for the unrealized gains.

When you actually find a loser to buy it for the asking higher price then you should be taxed for your lottery earnings.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#508

Post by whatever1 »

chii wrote: post #468
whatever1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the two is true: 1) The market value of a company is true, aka the owners of this company must be taxed for the real value growth in their portfolio (since it constitutes income), even if they do not sell 2) It’s a casino, a share is just a ticket that may worth nothing or a billion. In that case we don’t need tax protections. The owners of the tickets must be taxed only when they cash out. The governments sho…

> The market value of a company is true, aka the owners of this company must be taxed for the real value growth in their portfolio (since it constitutes income) well, if you follow this logical conclusion, why are you not taxing a baby because the baby's value is the future income of that person's job. Sure, it's unrealized, but you're still considering it income even though it's unrealized.

That is the definition of speculation. Maybe the baby does not make it to adulthood so it produced 0 value. It makes no sense to tax speculated value.

If you are certain that your baby this year is bringing home tangible income due to its TikTok page, then yes tax it.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#509

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

dragontamer wrote: post #170
dpcx wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't played Factorio, so maybe I'm missing something... but if you don't have buffers and suddenly whatever that produces something essentially goes away, what happens to all your just in time pieces? Seems pretty certain that they'll all end up idle.

Yes. Iron mines run out in Factorio. That then causes the player to search for new sources of iron to fix your supply chain issue. ----------- In contrast, if you buffered up... you end up running out of Iron 10 hours ago. Then your buffers deplete and you're back in the same position, except you've built out your supply chain to be even more fragile than before (because you had an additional 10 hours of expansion).

That's because you're not setting up alerts to warn you when your buffers are depleting. In a simple system like Factorio, adding a buffer to catch oversupply should never stop production more than not having a buffer at all. (A related problem in Factorio is that the available buffers tend to fill themselves based on the topology of the belt network rather than actual oversupply, and then tend to not empty into where they are needed until the logistics network is developed. In the real world there are price signals and communication between factories, so supplies are not allocated to factories on a first-come first-serve basis (inserters serving themselves).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#510

Post by TheBigSalad »

flurie wrote: post #45

The buried lede is an assertion that a tax on unrealized capital gains will cause reduced private ownership of large companies, resulting in a reduced ability to handle 100-year flood events. Along the way, there are a bunch of other assertions that serve as prerequisites, like the idea that these companies can cultivate better employee loyalty and plan for longer horizons. How much do we know about how true that is,…

Only the superwealthy can save us.
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