How we broke the supply chain • Hacker News Board

Re: How we broke the supply chain

#111

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #108

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What widening? Throughput at ports is within a few percent of where it has been.

The first derivative of food supply disruption is clearly positive. The exact value of the second is debatable, but I feel confident saying it is at least not clearly substantially negative. Slightly negative at best and I can't give a lot of evidence for that. The sum total of that disruption has not yet burned through our buffer, though it has caused a noticeable rise in prices. However, it is not wise to wait for…

> The first derivative of food supply disruption is clearly positive.

It might be more than it was a month ago, but it seems to me that we had worse disruption earlier in the pandemic than we have right now.

Re: How we broke the supply chain

#112

Post by leobg » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #95

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #84

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…

> He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality. What? No TSA? No stripping at airports? And allowed to bring your own liquids on airplanes? What horribly primitive times those must have been.

Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday wrote about his first visit to the United States in the time before WWI:

“No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin, and what was more—an amazing thing to imagine in our modern world of fingerprints, visas and police permits—I had travelled without a passport. But there was work waiting for people to do it, and that was all that counted. Fabulous as it now seems, a contract could be instantly agreed without today’s inhibiting intervention of state formalities and trade unions.”

Re: How we broke the supply chain

#113

Post by EdwardDiego » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 8:39 AM UTC

leobg wrote: post #112

mellavora wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality. What? No TSA? No stripping at airports? And allowed to bring your own liquids on airplanes? What horribly primitive times those must have been.

Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday wrote about his first visit to the United States in the time before WWI: “No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin, and what was more—an amazing thing to imagine in our modern world of fingerprints, visas and police permits—I had travelled without a passport. But there was work waiting for people to do it, and that was all that counted. Fabulous as it now seems,…

> a contract could be instantly agreed without today’s inhibiting intervention of state formalities and trade unions

Stefan Zweig was a novelist, poet and playwright, born of a wealthy family, so we can forgive him his lack of understanding of why state formalities and unions exist.

(People don't generally form unions if they're being well paid and well treated, as my first piece of evidence, look at the thorough lack of unionisation in software developers).