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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#561

Post by kergonath »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #544
irjustin wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Sadly the incentives government officials face also often favor short time horizons.

Thanks in some part to the fundamentally misguided idea that governments should be run like businesses.

> Therefore I favor any marginal increased investment for 100-year floods from any part of society

Definitely agree. We are bad at dealing with this kind of risk profile, and we need to be more aware of this.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#562

Post by erikbye »

lucumo wrote: post #558
erikbye wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm reminded of the old sarcastic comment that "Linux is free, if your time has no value". Wow, a thread about supply chains and you manage to take a cheap jab at Linux. In response, try running Windows on a computer you only use once a month. You can watch it update every time instead of getting work done. Linux you can update while working.

Once a month? No. I hardly even reboot my Windows machine once a month... Only the major releases of Windows 10 need a stop the world reboot. Those happen once every six months. And it's usually only a few minutes. That's for a home machine. I've seen some enterprise machines take forever. I have no idea how they managed to fuck that up, but it's on the IT organisation of those enterprises, not on Windows.

I said once a month, because if you use your computer once a month there is no point having it powered on 24/7, not economical. What happens is you power it on when you need to use it, Windows starts downloading updates in the background, the next time you power on, installation starts on boot.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#563

Post by phreeza »

Honestly I think we have been getting through the pandemic with surprisingly little problems regarding supply chains, at least as far as I am personally concerned. Anything I have heard has been basically minor inconvenience or higher prices.

I have lived in a major city when all the country's truck drivers went on strike and supermarket shelves were empty within a day. I can tell you that was an all together different feeling. Of course truckers would probably not have let the population starve, but it showed me how fragile life in a big city really is. Not getting my new car delivered on time because of a chip shortage is extremely low in the range of potential bad outcomes.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#564

Post by phreeza »

mckirk wrote: post #550
dpierce9 wrote: post #136

The 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'.

No, if they arrive independently then they are best described by a poisson process, and the expected time to arrival is exactly 1/(event probability per interval). Not sure where you got the 0.5 from?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#566

Post by etripe »

herendin2 wrote: post #516
zelon88 wrote: post #207

I worked at a company who made products on contract, but the contract stipulated the vendor we had to use to get the raw materials. The raw materials were just aluminum castings, but they were a custom shape specifically for this customer of ours. They could only be used for this one product. I noticed that the inventory levels of our vendor were dropping, but we weren't buying. Meaning our customer was ordering the…

Game theory. If the idea occurred to you, then one can almost guarantee it will eventually occur to others - and to someone at your competitor. With that understanding, there's only one rational course of action: to secure your supply before they do, and your competitor realized all this. The only real decision to make is whether to risk the more aggressive move of also locking up your competitor's supply.

Based on their example, in practice the decision is between dealing with reality and following management framework dogma at all costs.

Game theory offers amazing insights, but it doesn't really deal with internal company politics, the power of business consultants and the desire to obtain silver bullets.

Could it be that quarterly/annual budgets make one assume participation in a finite game, rather than infinite? That's precisely the kind of thing the author of the tweet chain seems to be describing.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#567

Post by lucumo »

erikbye wrote: post #562
lucumo wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a month? No. I hardly even reboot my Windows machine once a month... Only the major releases of Windows 10 need a stop the world reboot. Those happen once every six months. And it's usually only a few minutes. That's for a home machine. I've seen some enterprise machines take forever. I have no idea how they managed to fuck that up, but it's on the IT organisation of those enterprises, not on Windows.

I said once a month, because if you use your computer once a month there is no point having it powered on 24/7, not economical. What happens is you power it on when you need to use it, Windows starts downloading updates in the background, the next time you power on, installation starts on boot.

Those updates don't get installed at boot time. Modern Windows installs most updates in the background. The only ones that require a reboot are the big ones, every 6 months.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#568

Post by phatfish »

lucumo wrote: post #567
erikbye wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said once a month, because if you use your computer once a month there is no point having it powered on 24/7, not economical. What happens is you power it on when you need to use it, Windows starts downloading updates in the background, the next time you power on, installation starts on boot.

Those updates don't get installed at boot time. Modern Windows installs most updates in the background. The only ones that require a reboot are the big ones, every 6 months.

You lost me there. Which version of Windows will install the monthly cumulative update without a reboot?

Server 2016 (and older versions of W10) are horrendous for updates. You can have servers stuck on "configuring updates" during shutdown or startup for over 30 mins. Server 2019 is much better though.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#569

Post by Gravityloss »

erispoe wrote: post #554
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…

The same rebalancing happened in Europe, and Europe doesn't have close to the issues the US has regarding supply chain. Europe's major ports are automated and operate 24/7, port to hinterland relies much more on rail than trucking. Overall, the US supply chain was already very fragile and outdated.

Hmm, I thought US rail freight system is massive, excellent and envied by the whole world. When in the US, I saw these double decker container trains with the bogies at the ends (so the lower container could be below the axle).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#570

Post by p_l »

throwaway4good wrote: post #106

What it is the alternative to the current just-in-time regime? Warehouses filled with stuff to be sold. Overproduction. Stuff getting destroyed because it expires or cannot be sold for whatever reason. We may get there, hopefully only temporary, as a reaction to the current situation. For most companies, the amount paid to the factory in China or elsewhere, is only tiny fraction of the price the product is sold for.…

Well, Overproduction is a problem when you make big batches and then need to store them. A lot of "inputs" outside of food production can be stockpiled reasonably longer, so without breaking with JIT/Lean philosophy all you need to do is to create a bigger buffer at the start of the value chain, which might mean that missing X deliveries won't stop your production rate instead of 1 missing delivery stopping the whole factory.
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