Efficiency is better for the environment than stockpiling.
Not always. Jevon's paradox shows that as you increase efficiency the lower costs can increase overall consumption.
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
541–550 of 690 posts
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm completely aware of this. It's still not an issue of luck when all of your eggs are in one geographical basket.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#543Earlier 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 have owned both the cheap cold water amazon ones and TOTOs. Highly recommend either. If you don’t mind cold water the cheap amazon ones work really well.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#544The average lifespan of a company is 10 years.[0] The average lifespan of companies on the S&P is maybe a little more than twice that. Each year you have a 1/100 chance of seeing a hundred year flood. With a short lifespan the odds are decent that your company simply won’t see one. The question is then: how good of an idea is it to spend to be robust to them? Of course it is viciously circular: planning to not be rob…
I agree with this more than Ryan Peterson. Governments need to be built up to handle 100 year floods. Businesses standard life time don't last long enough to spend a ton of resources on betting towards those kinds of time scales.
Sadly the incentives government officials face also often favor short time horizons. Therefore I favor any marginal increased investment for 100-year floods from any part of society
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This type of buffering actually leads to the sort of supply chain bottlenecks we are experiencing. If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory.
It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage we are seeing. Our processes require a long lead time, which depends on accurate forecasting to work well. When the forecasts fail, you additionally get huge knock-on effects because downstream products also get delayed, which delays additional products.
It's incredibly efficient, nobody is denying that, but what can also not be denied is that incredibly fragile.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#546This 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…
I don't know a ton about finance, but isn't "value investing" another way of describing the thing Ryan is complaining about? ("Value investing" = using metrics like P/E ratio)
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#547All 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…
Frankly, people buy a lot of stuff they don't need. But I wonder how the dependence on disposable items plays in. I could never understand stressing one bit about the most disposable items like paper towels. Completely non-essential items.
People also get sent a lot of stuff they never asked for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, people buy a lot of stuff they don't need. But I wonder how the dependence on disposable items plays in. I could never understand stressing one bit about the most disposable items like paper towels. Completely non-essential items.
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,…
>but we have ready access to laundry
Thank you for recognizing this point. It costs me $6 to do a (small) load of laundry at my complex and the time cost of going to a laundromat makes it economically unviable.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
After talking extensively about the benefits of bum guns with my friends when we were in Asia, the hot vs cold country is a big differentiator. We loved them when we were out there, feels so much cleaner. Its also quite refreshing.
Back in the UK though you during the winter the water will be extremely cold and you really don't want to be damp down there.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#550The average lifespan of a company is 10 years.[0] The average lifespan of companies on the S&P is maybe a little more than twice that. Each year you have a 1/100 chance of seeing a hundred year flood. With a short lifespan the odds are decent that your company simply won’t see one. The question is then: how good of an idea is it to spend to be robust to them? Of course it is viciously circular: planning to not be rob…
Small correction: Each year you have a (1-0.5^(1/100))≈0.69% chance of seeing a hundred year flood, if I'm not mistaken (and assuming hundred-year-floods happen independently of each other).
At 1% chance each year, it would actually be 'sixtynine year floods'.