How we broke the supply chain

Why would you not be able to enter into such an agreement?

Basically everywhere in business people negotiate bulk rate discounts. And why wouldn’t they?

Often businesses will only agree to a deeper discount if you agree not to tell others what rate you got.

It seems odd to me that this wouldn’t be allowed.

I'm just going to point out that this is the world's second period of globalisation and we are maybe seeing the second collapse. The first period was roughly from 1870 to 1914 and was brought to its end by the shock of the first world war and the following flu pandemic which, as well as directly killing lots of people, also led to mass restrictions on travel and the breakdown of the supply chain in large portions of the world. I think there are some fairly obvious similarities to what is happening today. The decades following the collapse of the first age of globalisation were not good for a lot of people, to put it mildly.

It's worth quoting John Maynard Keynes about what the world was like prior to 1914 (if you were a rich westerner) and considering the parallels.

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

He could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share — without exertion or even trouble — in their prospective fruits and advantages.

Or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.

He could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient — and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person.

He would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent — except in the direction of further improvement."

The question becomes, how can we avoid a 21st century equivalent to the inter war years and their culminating horrors if we are seeing a collapse of the second age of globalisation?

Strongly disagree with shifting the blame from "we" to "they".

To mentally distance ourselves is a cop-out as we are all willing participant (if not actively enabling the problem) so it is incredibly important that people don't compartmentalise away these type of issues.

We are seeing a shock to a system we have all contributed to and handsomely benefited from. Of course, some people are more to blame than others, however in many case the root causes are boring small decisions that are good for the individuals but have negative long term consequence for everyone. i.e. Whether "poor" or "rich", very few people are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective good. ("Tyranny of small decisions").

Question: What are you willing to sacrifice?

This "article" looks at a problem and tries to guess what the causes are. This without actually checking if those guesses are correct, or knowing too much about why the US is so much more troublesome than anywhere else.

e.g. it completely skips over the reliance on chassis to do anything on a US terminal. Anywhere else in the world and the terminal setup is quite different. Another issue is that most other places in the world work 24/7, unlike US terminals. This is coupled with a really strong but strange union (preventing any changes) on the US terminal side, while trucks are more or less abused.

It complains about things (globalization) that on its own aren't bad. What's bad is that various governments did nothing to prevent that only a few benefitted from that globalization in e.g. US/Northern Europe.

Then it points towards some law that's a US law and not global. It's a bit strange to ignore China->Europe trade.

I can certainly see some supply chain disruptions in Germany. For example, in the supermarket, there's always something out of stock that you need. But it's a minor inconvenience, nothing more than that. Just a few items. But I don't remember worrying about things being out of stock, ever.