What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? • Hacker News Board

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#591

Post by roenxi » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 12:27 PM UTC

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 Overall, the US supply chain was already very fragile and outdated.

Did it? And doesn't it? How can you tell? Both Europe and the US are large and complicated.

Last I heard Europe was in the middle of an energy crisis which could easily turn out to be linked to supply chain disruptions. It has been long enough for the slow-rolling-wave nature of economic disasters to start surfacing, but it is too early to raise a head up and talk about cause and effect without some citations.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#592

Post by sumtechguy » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

erikbye wrote: post #553

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…

> 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.

To be fair any newish computer OS is going to act the same way in that condition, linux included. I know if I put any of my linux computers in that mode of use they would. My PS4 I use maybe every 2-3 months. Large update every time usually on the order of an hour to do so. I am pretty sure I have not 'paid' for a copy of any OS in 15 years (and that was because I built a computer). Yet I spend a good amount of time 'fixing' things. I pay in spades in time, no matter what little amount I may have forked out when I bought the computer.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#593

Post by baryphonic » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

One major claim of Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith's "Rationality in Economics" is "the profit-maximizing firm will fail in finite time."

The book is excellent, one of my favorite econ books, and is Smith's somewhat dense but well-written explanation for and interpretation of economics. His main thesis is that "rationality" is not a "constructivist" property of various agents, being possessed by any (or every) individual separately, but is an "ecological" property that emerges collectively from e.g. the price system, organization of firms and other economic relations.

His argument about profit-maximizing firms proceeds almost exactly along the lines of this tweetstorm, but goes further. Why would Wall Street want to reward companies that fail to be robust to changes? Are there other structural problems (the law? regulatory regime? bailouts? monopoly?) that cause CEOs and Wall Street actors to be collectively "irrational" as we are seeing today with JIT-everything?

IMHO, the problem is political-economic. Finance has arrived at this equilibrium of asset price insanity and phony accounting because the regulatory regime and state actions as a whole (e.g. bailouts) are entirely out of whack – the system has no working feedback mechanisms at the moment, so the economy is in a real sense failing. How did the state fail? Partly in response to demands from powerful & wealthy entities on e.g. Wall Street.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#594

Post by dpezet » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 12:44 PM UTC

“Over the long run, in our complex, dynamic, power law world, the reference assets will be those companies winners willing to challenge the dogma of modern finance.”

This might be the worst sentence I have ever read.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#595

Post by nradov » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

_3u10 wrote: post #574

kergonath wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Government can’t even let private sector build houses for 1 year demand. I don’t forsee them being able to manage anything on 100 year timescales. Just look at the climate change stupidity, any city in the world could build a 6 foot sea wall and give the middle finger to climate change in a year with minimal cost but instead we have all manner of stupid at an international level. I used to live in a city that was in…

See walls don't work for every city in the world. Miami, for example, sits on a porous karst substrate so building a sea wall wouldn't do much to prevent flooding.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#596

Post by sct202 » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

BikiniPrince wrote: post #525

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 fina…

Taiwan didn't lockdown their factories. Their border is highly restricted for entry but they haven't really gone beyond closing indoor dining and karaoke.

In Q3 2021, TSMC shipped 12.5% more wafers year over year and +5.7% quarter to quarter during the period with the highest covid restrictions. And that's already on top of the 19% increase in shipments for the full year 2020 over 2019.

https://investor.tsmc.com/english/encrypt/files/encrypt_file...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#597

Post by circa » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

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…

I completely agree. I've been saying that and I thought it was fairly obvious too.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#598

Post by snarf21 » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

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…

I listened to a podcast recently that spoke specifically about how the container unloading is a major issue. Certain areas have zoning restrictions about stacking empty zoning containers only 2 high (Santa Monica??). So the container hauling trailers have largely got stuck holding empties so they can't clear the docks which means we aren't clearing the ports quick enough. I know there have been recent strides to to bypass some of these rules but it is like a slinky and will take a while to catch up. My guess is that "normal" is still 9 months away.

The other big factor in this speaks to your point. We are importing far more than exporting. Containers have gone up 10x in price over the last year and we need to get all these empties back to Asia, etc.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#599

Post by InitialLastName » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

throaway46546 wrote: post #548

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,…

>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.

Laundry is one of those things I've lived without comfortable access to for long enough to appreciate what I have now.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#600

Post by evrydayhustling » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

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…

Your raise an interesting question about whether private firms are the right actors to invest in long-term infrastructure. Alternatives include governments (whether via policy or public infrastructure) and also longer-lived industry consortiums.

With that said, citing averages on companies can be pretty misleading. For example, family-owned businesses tend to last longer, with 1/3 reaching 60 years [0]. That naively suggests a mortality rate of ~1.8% per year, not that far from the risk of a 100y storm. There may be other categories of private firm that are more optimized for longevity, or it may be possible to structure them in order to make better infrastructure actors.

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/07/do-most-family-businesses-really-fai...