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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#621

Post by nuerow »

neves wrote: post #620

I liked this tweet of the thread: "Almost nobody has any employee loyalty because they haven't been willing to take care of their people through thick and thin of business, and thus they can't staff up quickly to meet surging demand. All businesses now complain about employee loyalty, but have we earned it?" It's hard to find someone loyal to their employer. The only loyal low level workers that I know they work in t…

> All businesses now complain about employee loyalty, but have we earned it?

I'd say that business schools have been for the past few decades teaching that management has to be outright militantly hostile towards any employee, going through great lengths to work them to death and drop them at the drop of a hat.

Thus, these people have been leading by example on how everything and everyone is replaceable, even creating and validating the temp agency industry as a legitimate employer, and once the lessons on how everyone and everything is replaceable are applied by employees towards employers... We have a crisis?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#622

Post by jollybean »

whatever1 wrote: post #487
jollybean wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, unrealized gains are not income. We 'don't want it' to be taxed because it doesn't make sense. Also, you'd have to provide a tax shield for the losses as well. There are so many things wrong with taxing on 'mark to market value'. We can barely get away with it in real estate, but that market acts more rationally, and most of it is about rent extraction.

“ 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?

You are not paying taxes on the unrealized capital gains made from buying your car.

Can you imagine if your Tesla was deemed to have a market value of 2x what you bought it for, because a few random idiots were trying to buy it up?

And you had a gigantic tax bill on that?

Unrealized gains are not gains.

What 'someone else' is willing to pay for your property isn't necessarily very well related to how you value it.

It might possibly work for real estate in controlled conditions but even then it's risky. For equities, it's really hard to have an asset tax.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#623

Post by rackjack »

titzer wrote: post #615
baryphonic wrote: post #593

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…

The system is coming apart, shaking itself to bits because it's become unmoored from its foundations. It seems like a lot of different reasons because the system is so complex that it's fractal; you can zoom in to any one part and still see complexity, so it's easy to pick out PhD-thesis-size problems and just get lost in it. But fundamentally, if you zoom out, it's really simple. It's greed . I'm not religious or sp…

This has happened many times before, and it will keep happening because humans do not (cannot?) change their fundamental nature. Even if society as we know it dies, it'll just get reborn like a cursed phoenix. Every doomsayer seems to forget that there is nothing new under the sun, and society has "fallen" and picked itself back up over and over and over again, but this time "it used to be better" and this time "society will really die, because it's different!" Of course it's different, but humans don't change.

> Just a couple decades ago, people dreamed of simpler lives. Plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners.

Please. The Roaring 20's? The Gilded Age, anyone?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#625

Post by OldHand2018 »

m4rtink wrote: post #606
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With shipping containers being sent back to Asia empty rather than taking an extra leg to mid-America to fill up on US farm products to sell in Asia, is the price of soybeans and corn in Asia going to spike soon?

Do you really ship this stuff in containers rather than by bulk carrier ?

Farmers are smarter than you give them credit for.

They check real-time shipping costs and choose the cheaper option. It takes a few dollars worth of cardboard to turn a shipping container into a suitable container for corn or soybean shipping (really!).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#626

Post by titzer »

rackjack wrote: post #623
titzer wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system is coming apart, shaking itself to bits because it's become unmoored from its foundations. It seems like a lot of different reasons because the system is so complex that it's fractal; you can zoom in to any one part and still see complexity, so it's easy to pick out PhD-thesis-size problems and just get lost in it. But fundamentally, if you zoom out, it's really simple. It's greed . I'm not religious or sp…

This has happened many times before, and it will keep happening because humans do not (cannot?) change their fundamental nature. Even if society as we know it dies, it'll just get reborn like a cursed phoenix. Every doomsayer seems to forget that there is nothing new under the sun, and society has "fallen" and picked itself back up over and over and over again, but this time "it used to be better" and this time "soci…

Things weren't so great after the Roman empire fell. The wreckage left in the wake of falling societies is never pretty. Look at Easter island.

Things are bit different now. The economy is global, human impact on the planet is global and massive. We are beyond its carrying capacity and are quickly expending its energy reserves. But that's a different conversation.

None of us were alive in the "roaring 20s", but I will point out that that was very localized to east coast cities. Trust me, there were no roaring twenties out on the prairie.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#627

Post by rhacker »

nicoburns wrote: post #583
tikkabhuna wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if you could get one with warm water. And why not use a towel to dry off afterwards? Many people keep one in the bathroom for showering anyway.

I'm picturing the towel people use to dry there hands suddenly used ALSO to dry butts.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#628

Post by dragontamer »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #511
dragontamer wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ok. So the problem is that your furnaces are too greedy. They are buffering up in the absence of oversupply. There are many in-game solutions to that, but in reality we use price signals. When price signals are not available, we shame people for being greedy and hoarding.

Well, what if some of us think that the cryptominers are being too greedy, and maybe they should cut back on their chip orders so that car companies get more chips?

This chip shortage thing was foreseen in March: 7 months ago. That was more than enough time for a new batch of chips to be made or for production runs to be reallocated.

EDIT: Taiwan seems to think some hoarding is going on: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4306366. We know that all chip-manufacturers are using more wafers and creating more chips than ever before. Yes, even this year (even as Texas got that cold-snap and frozen power plants). So why do we have a chip shortage?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#629

Post by vietthan »

nuerow wrote: post #621
neves wrote: post #620

I liked this tweet of the thread: "Almost nobody has any employee loyalty because they haven't been willing to take care of their people through thick and thin of business, and thus they can't staff up quickly to meet surging demand. All businesses now complain about employee loyalty, but have we earned it?" It's hard to find someone loyal to their employer. The only loyal low level workers that I know they work in t…

> All businesses now complain about employee loyalty, but have we earned it? I'd say that business schools have been for the past few decades teaching that management has to be outright militantly hostile towards any employee, going through great lengths to work them to death and drop them at the drop of a hat. Thus, these people have been leading by example on how everything and everyone is replaceable, even creatin…

it's weird but the military got it. Soldiers fight for their brothers or ideology, not for the brass.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#630

Post by pradn »

Why is there an expectation that the consumer goods economy will be robust to a once-in-a-100-years global pandemic? It's a nice property to have for sure, and we should plan for it from a public health and governance point of view. But should we expect consumer good production to be robust to such a major event? Yes, some people are seeing sofas take months to come in, and books are taking longer to be produced (there's not enough supply for the books of the latest Nobel winner, for example), but these are not necessarily necessary goods. Food and other necessary ingredients of a normal life seem relatively okay. But I am in a little bubble, like everyone else.

When everyone is going through pain, people don't put too much blame in one person. If every country is losing people to the virus, people seem willing to not punish a government that loses a lot of people. If every company is suffering from supply-chain issues, wall street will not necessarily put special onus on a particular company, saving a company's leadership from embarrassment. That said, certain sectors do seem to be hit - Apple's recent miss vs Microsoft, for example.

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