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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#661

Post by m0zg »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #582
m0zg wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as the fact that taxing unrealized gains would have to come with _issuing tax rebates_ for unrealized losses - something the government would find difficult to do in the case of a systemic economic downturn a-la 2008. And then there's the fact that you aren't really creating any new revenue by taxing unrealized gains if they are going to be, at some point, realized. Last I checked shares of stock aren't very…

>something the government would find difficult to do in the case of a systemic economic downturn a-la 2008 Not really. They'd just print more money.

Ah but see, they'd already be printing trillions. This could get them into tens of trillions which would exacerbate the issue. This is sort of like the problem the guy alludes to: this would remove what few shock absorbers this system has.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#662

Post by m0zg »

paganel wrote: post #524
m0zg wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a book on economics to understand this. Just read some real, actual history books to see that after a war or revolution of any kind _nobody_ is better off. Start with the French revolution and just go over all of them in order. A hundred million people who died at the hands of the fascist or communist governments in the past century are, one would hope, a sufficient proof of that.

I think that many of us still believe that real, wide-scale economic levelling is still possible in normal times, there aren't that many history books that actively refute that (or at least I haven't read that many), that's why I mentioned that book and its conclusions.

"Many of us" believe Earth is flat. Doesn't mean it's true. Look at the evidence.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#663

Post by m4rtink »

OldHand2018 wrote: post #625
m4rtink wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

Interesting! Still packing/unpacking could take longer I guess, in comparison to a modern bulk terminal, right ?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#664

Post by collinmanderson »

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…

It probably helps that Tim Cook had a lot of supply-chain experience before he became CEO. They also ship their phones from China by air rather than sea.

I duck-duck-go'd for a source and happened upon this article from 2015 :)

https://www.flexport.com/blog/does-apple-ship-iphones-by-air...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#665

Post by eitland »

jjk166 wrote: post #655
eitland wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

JIT may have originated at Toyota, but Toyota's version of JIT is not what is nowadays commonly referred to as JIT. Toyota's production sytem is a lean manufacturing method where stages of production are rate matched (ie operation B is using parts at the same rate operation A is producing them), but there still are buffers of inventory between stages. The goal is to make the whole system communicate in such a way tha…

Which was my point: JIT might been have misunderstood.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#666

Post by EdwardDiego »

quadrangle wrote: post #479
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…

Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently. We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine. Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper go…

Or, different people have different circumstances.

Like, say, a low pressure water supply, limited to 900L a day.

There's a reason we went with scraping the solids off, then soaking the nappies. It wasn't a lack of wisdom.

Wisdom is why we used a washing line instead of a dryer, as the UV in my country is amazing at removing the left over stains.

It's also great at giving people with a Northern European heritage skin cancer, so you know, upsides and downsides.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#667

Post by EdwardDiego »

wsc981 wrote: post #469
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…

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_…

Sweet, so I'd just need to pay a plumber to install that - if my water pressure was sufficient to run it (it isn't), as I'm not seeing a pump.

I get your point, but yeah, differing circumstances.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#668

Post by mamurphy »

eitland wrote: post #649
deelowe wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any sources your can share or more info about this?

I Googled and the first result was "Under delta, supply chain strains, Toyota slashes production."[0] Many similar results[1][2][3].

Six months ago they were getting temporary reprieve because they monitored supply and snapped some up[4], but now, six months later, they seem to be having to slash production like everyone else.

[0]https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-technology-business-hea...

[1]https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a37364490/toyota-cutting-g... [2]https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/toyota-slashes-producti... (pbs reiterates AP report) [3]https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/stocks-options/thursday-...

[4]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-07/how-toyot...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#669

Post by bjowen »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #666
quadrangle wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently. We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine. Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper go…

Or, different people have different circumstances. Like, say, a low pressure water supply, limited to 900L a day. There's a reason we went with scraping the solids off, then soaking the nappies. It wasn't a lack of wisdom. Wisdom is why we used a washing line instead of a dryer, as the UV in my country is amazing at removing the left over stains. It's also great at giving people with a Northern European heritage skin…

Super off-topic but national differences in washing lines vs dryer use are fascinating. In an early attempt to replicate the Japanese line-drying time forecast[0], I looked around for English-language articles about clothes drying, and the predominant advice was to always use a clothes dryer, because line-drying takes too long, encourages mould and mould is deadly and to be feared. Which seemed weird as I’d never owned a dryer.

Props on sticking to your guns for so long with cloth nappies, I know some couples who couldn’t make it work and felt they’d let themselves down.

[0] https://tenki.jp/lite/indexes/cloth_dried/

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#670

Post by baryphonic »

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…

> True inflation has likely been ~4% since 2008. The S&P average is ~7.25% per year. So half of the "capital gains" the ordinary index fund investor would pay are just inflation.

How does one measure "true inflation?" I am sympathetic to the idea that inflation is nearly unmeasurable, but not the idea that "true inflation" was happening when it clearly, obviously was not.

> And what's worst - the Fed is causing so much of that inflation.

The Fed causes all inflation (at least in the US – Europeans have the EU central bank and Britishers have the Bank of England). Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

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