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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#521

Post by theshrike79 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #186

How bad are the supply chain bottlenecks really? Compared to the amount of discussion on the matter they seem pretty minimal outside a couple sectors. I certainly don't see any lack of products being sold at grocery and big box stores. The only exception I see are some hot items like GPUs and game consoles but I don't they the supply chain itself is the constraint but rather the actual silicon. The only significant e…

Getting a basic door for inside your house has a 2 month wait, it used to be 2-3 days.

A certain type of adapter (3/4 inch to 1/2 inch) used to attach modern washing machines to older water lines is completely sold out in every store on a 50km range from my house, no-one knows when it'll restock. All other sizes are fine.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#522

Post by jonny_eh »

jason0597 wrote: post #331
jonny_eh wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> violent means (wars, revolutions etc). Also plagues/disease. Currently relevant.

This would be true if lockdowns didn't happen. As it is most of the wealth-owning class was told to shut themselves inside, isolate, then we got the vaccine and they manage to live on and keep their wealth. So not even plagues can save us anymore.

Plagues don't change society by killing the rich and powerful, similar to how war doesn't upend society by killing those people.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#523

Post by dzhiurgis »

wsc981 wrote: post #469
EdwardDiego wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you just get a bum shower as used in many East-Asian countries, you can get away with very little paper towel use and don’t have to clean towels as well. And these bum showers can be bought on Amazon quite cheaply and shouldn’t be too difficult to install on any toilet. You’d also be much cleaner I think. This is just one example of such a shower found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B086W1YZSH/ref=sspa_…

I’ve got japanese one and drying function just doesn’t cut it. In the end i use more toilet paper but experience is better. Could use cloth ones but toddler would destroy those.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#524

Post by paganel »

m0zg wrote: post #364
paganel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You don't need a book on economics to understand this. Just read some real, actual history books to see that after a war or revolution of any kind _nobody_ is better off. Start with the French revolution and just go over all of them in order. A hundred million people who died at the hands of the fascist or communist governments in the past century are, one would hope, a sufficient proof of that.

I think that many of us still believe that real, wide-scale economic levelling is still possible in normal times, there aren't that many history books that actively refute that (or at least I haven't read that many), that's why I mentioned that book and its conclusions.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#525

Post by BikiniPrince »

joe_the_user wrote: post #63

I believe the claim is completely defensible and ultimately correct. A) This was a multi-factoral event certainly but all of these other factor are "immediate causes" which can themselves be traced to absolute maximum return on equity as a more final cause. B) No doubt "hard to restart" process are were involved. But the world relies on single-source, hard to restart, large scale production of many things today becau…

I think your first mistake was saying 'I believe.'

Chip manufacturing has a clear start/end date for the product lifetime. This is necessary when you are incorporating a product into a design and product lifetime. Sometimes they will 'oops' you and send it out of print early. Generally, they have a 'b' product that "meets" your needs or product engineering just scrambles and tries to guess how many we need for a final run for our EOL. Much like the guy above me, the former requestor and probably his boss... I pad my estimates. Thank the baby Jesus I don't deal with the complicated world of sales and cocaine.

I want to put a big asterisk on "meets" because one man's performance metric is another man's failure. In discrete circuits this can be harmonics and in more complicated topology this could be tuned for an entirely different (but potentially acceptable) set of characteristics.

Enter the hardware qualification rounds where people like me make people cry and deadlines slip.

Supply lines work in months of advancement and trust me when I say this they have been fighting with chip shortages for months.

The people who care about costs have been playing a weird game of rubiks cube and the people who don't have been buying everything for year+ production. Guess who won that game of planning competition...

Taiwan going complete Orwellian and shutting down for months screwed the market in so many ways. Short sightedness on bean counters screwed themselves in many other ways and automobile manufacturers had the brilliant idea to just 'buy it all out' and give the manufacturers a big payday.

Seriously, chip manufacturers are like shoe string manufacturing. The latter counts wartime boot string orders as a big payday and that is something a lot of us look at as a bad year in a paycheck. (well the ones with skill anyway).

Lines are created with a product if the current line cannot manufacture that product. There are cases where they have to shutdown and completely retool. This isn't remotely the case regarding components today. The line simply stopped and/or went to minimal production. It wasn't news or a surprise because this is garbage we have been fighting with for months. Taiwan simply stopped producing at the level they were because they have some severe lockdown strategy.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#526

Post by stingraycharles »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #492
starky wrote: post #466

This is maybe half right. The demand for short term maximization of profits over all others is really driven by being a public company and shareholders only being satisfied if they see gains that exceed the market even at the detriment of the long term viability of the company. The US stock market is better at accepting risk of than my country (Canada) where companies are really harshly punished by shareholders if th…

If you think public markets are bad at creating poor long term incentives (they are) you should see what private equity does. 10x worse.

It highly depends upon who’s behind the private equity. As an anecdotal example that always stuck with me, Google post-public very quickly became a very different company, much less principled and “don’t be evil”.

Yet they did have private equity. I think they key difference is that you can choose to a reasonable degree who your private investors are, where there is no such option with public investors, and public markets tend to be more hostile.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#527

Post by FranksTV »

cbdumas wrote: post #314

All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…

Another missing piece is that COVID is still thriving in a lot of places, and typically in the places that are the "supply" in supply chain.

So while the demand is waking up there are still a lot of places with large numbers of people sick and/or dying because they don't have wealthy governments who can afford mass vaccination.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#528

Post by eru »

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…

> But yeah, disposables saved us (well mainly her) many hours of scraping shit, stirring a giant bucket of nappies with Napisan, washing them, hanging them out in the sun to let the UV sort the stains etc.

We are using (modern) cloth nappies (after having used disposables early on). Our washing machine handles it all with standard detergent. No stirring or Napisan necessary. The drying via hanging up is exactly the same as for any other laundry.

I do see your general point, of course. We mostly went with the cloth nappies in the first place, because of fitting issues.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#530

Post by wsc981 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #523
wsc981 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just get a bum shower as used in many East-Asian countries, you can get away with very little paper towel use and don’t have to clean towels as well. And these bum showers can be bought on Amazon quite cheaply and shouldn’t be too difficult to install on any toilet. You’d also be much cleaner I think. This is just one example of such a shower found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B086W1YZSH/ref=sspa_…

I’ve got japanese one and drying function just doesn’t cut it. In the end i use more toilet paper but experience is better. Could use cloth ones but toddler would destroy those.

> I’ve got japanese one and drying function just doesn’t cut it. In the end i use more toilet paper but experience is better. Could use cloth ones but toddler would destroy those.

Might depend how dry you want your bottom to be. I live in Thailand, so we got bum guns everywhere of similar style as the linked Amazon product (no drying function). I usually just use 2-4 sheets to "dry" my behind. If it's still a little bit wet, I don't mind, as my behind will get dry after a few minutes with pants on anyways (perhaps because I live in a hot country). At least I am 100% sure my behind is clean.

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