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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#641

Post by wahern »

joebob42 wrote: post #515
wahern wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot tax an asset that does not move. Property tax taxes an asset that doesn't move, literally and figuratively. Before financial markets exploded, and especially in agrarian societies like the United States at its founding, a property tax was effectively a wealth tax. (It still is a wealth tax, technically speaking, it just no longer reaches the wealth of the richest in society.) > In what intervals would yo…

Well in an agrarian society property produce money though, right?

In a capitalist society money (investments, etc) produces money. "Returns on investment" are like rents. And like rents, the government can choose to tax the asset itself rather than or in addition to the rents.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#642

Post by jakub_g »

rhacker wrote: post #627
nicoburns wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is mainly with 99% of towels being ultra symmetric (up/down, left/right, front/reverse). When your towel is asymmetric, you can split it into zones for various things :)

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#643

Post by cbdumas »

kurthr wrote: post #432
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 think the difficulty in making that case is that expenditures are in $ not functional units. So what you may be seeing is more higher prices (a symptom of supply chain breakdown) not more purchases, while services largely stayed similar in price and similar in volume (to slightly down due to extra money spent on pricy goods).

The data in my second link is a quantity index, so I believe price is not a factor

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#644

Post by mdtancsa »

chii wrote: post #459
stainforth wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B) Buyers are not willing actors

Why is that? they arent forced to "buy" at gunpoint.

I great term I came across in the retail gas industry is "hostile purchase"... as in no one "wants" to buy gas in the sense that you wake up one day and think "Oh boy, I can hardly wait to go out and get some 87 octane today" and after the purchase, "wow, that was awesome gas!"...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#645

Post by depaya »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #491
onion2k wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad worked on some testing software for a float glass factory back in the 1980s. Float glass is a process where a factory makes a continuous sheet of glass that floats on a river of molten tin, about 3 meters wide, 24 hours a day. It never stops. If it does then the glass cools down and solidifies inside the machinery, and the factory needs to be practically scrapped and rebuilt. I imagine that's the worst case sc…

> It never stops. If it does then the glass cools down and solidifies inside the machinery That's why you can't just flip a switch to turn it off. But what if you stop feeding glass in and wait half a day first?

Couple of things to consider:

Many of the processes might require the product is pushed and/or pulled through the machinery. If there is no material behind to push it could cause problems within the machines.

Once the continuous process is broken it needs to be restarted somehow. Depending on the type of production this could be days or weeks of work just to rethread all the material through the machines and getting it going.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#646

Post by cbdumas »

rossdavidh wrote: post #605
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 reason just-in-time is to blame, is that JIT assumes you have a reasonably stable flow (yes, I worked in manufacturing where we studied JIT a lot). Yes, it was a shift from services to goods that provided the current shock, but it was JIT that meant the system could not adapt to shocks. If you have no buffers (or very small ones), then you cannot quickly adapt. If you put a vase on top of your car and drive away,…

I'm definitely outside my wheelhouse here, so maybe help me understand the current fixation on and criticism of JIT. Are you advocating for more buffers in supply chains generally? If the current scenario is one where goods purchases were simply deferred from early in the pandemic to later (with no real increase in total demand for goods) I can see that solving the issue to some extent.

But my point is that total demand for goods has actually increased and not by a little, by a lot. Buffers in the supply chain can't help with that, can they? An increase in total throughput is needed to solve that, and that's going to take a while. Is there something I'm missing here?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#647

Post by tekromancr »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #549
wsc981 wrote: post #530

Earlier 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. 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.

The one I have I run a hot and cold line into it for warm water; then I just sit for a minute or two to air dry. I don't live in a particularly hot or dry region, either.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#648

Post by dragontamer »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #509
dragontamer wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Iron mines run out in Factorio. That then causes the player to search for new sources of iron to fix your supply chain issue. ----------- In contrast, if you buffered up... you end up running out of Iron 10 hours ago. Then your buffers deplete and you're back in the same position, except you've built out your supply chain to be even more fragile than before (because you had an additional 10 hours of expansion).

That's because you're not setting up alerts to warn you when your buffers are depleting. In a simple system like Factorio, adding a buffer to catch oversupply should never stop production more than not having a buffer at all. (A related problem in Factorio is that the available buffers tend to fill themselves based on the topology of the belt network rather than actual oversupply, and then tend to not empty into wher…

> to catch oversupply

What oversupply?

Every chip that was allocated to cars has been used to make more cars. Saving up more chips in 2020, 2019, or 2018 would have only resulted in fewer cars being built compared to today.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#649

Post by eitland »

deelowe wrote: post #635
rossdavidh wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason just-in-time is to blame, is that JIT assumes you have a reasonably stable flow (yes, I worked in manufacturing where we studied JIT a lot). Yes, it was a shift from services to goods that provided the current shock, but it was JIT that meant the system could not adapt to shocks. If you have no buffers (or very small ones), then you cannot quickly adapt. If you put a vase on top of your car and drive away,…

Yep. The push for zero inventory, just in time, outsourced manufacturing created a traffic jam when there was no buffer to absorb the shock.

It might be worth nothing that Toyota - from where the JIT idea came - hasn't been as much affected by it as many others.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#650

Post by N00bN00b »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #612
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…

I think the massive difference between income and capital gains taxes plays a huge role - especially when you get into the .1% where a substantial portion of wealth and income lie. All of this funny stuff is mostly people trying everything they can to get capital gains instead of income so they can pay a 25% tax rate instead of a 39% tax rate. When you're talking about billions of dollars - 14% is a lot of money. Fro…

>All of this funny stuff is mostly people trying everything they can to get capital gains instead of income so they can pay a 25% tax rate instead of a 39% tax rate. When you're talking about billions of dollars - 14% is a lot of money.

0.1% doesn't pay 25%. That's well documented. I don't know what the effective rate is, but averaged out over multiple years it's probably somewhere around 5% and then another few % that's spent on avoidance (not taxes). Maybe 10% at most.

Just look up Bezos or Musk's tax return. Same with Buffett.

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