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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#191

Post by Grakel »

legitster wrote: post #158

No, no, no! Stockpiling is not a solution to a bottleneck! In the grand scheme of things, having a couple weeks of extra inventory on hand will not help you weather a 100 year storm. But it will increase waste - inventory that you have to throw away when there are defects or when they become obsolete. Imagine trying to predict the run on lumber, and the solution was to have kept a bunch of lumber sitting in yards rot…

Quite the opposite, the lumber industry has been selling greener and wetter wood year after year. If they would stockpile the quality would increase, and they could build a cushion to fluctuating demand.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#192

Post by zelias »

dragontamer wrote: post #154

Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.

this only works if you can successfully keep the biters out

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#193

Post by dragontamer »

zelias wrote: post #192
dragontamer wrote: post #154

Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.

this only works if you can successfully keep the biters out

It only takes like 2 hits for a biter to destroy your chests (aka: buffers) and everything inside of them.

If anything, buffer-free is more resilient than buffers when we think of the biter attacks. But this is a "gamey" aspect of the game. Not really representative of real life. (Its not like the items inside of a real-life warehouse just disappear into /dev/null under random circumstances)

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#194

Post by dragontamer »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #182
dragontamer wrote: post #154

Anyone who has played Factorio knows that "just in time" is far superior to actually holding reserves. If you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are. People are saying "why didn't we buffer up more" ? Well, there we go. Play Factorio. You'll see just how bad buffers are in a simulated factory.

Well at the same time, Factorio teaches you that you need some buffers to build a fault tolerant factory. Factorio often has implicit buffers through its belts (or bot network). If you build an inserter-only factory you'll become painfully aware how important they are to to the smooth operation of the factory. Otherwise it's very easy to get rolling waves of cascading backpressure, where the entire factory is only ab…

That's a throughput problem. Inserters have 1/20th the throughput of a belt. When you go truly just in time _WITH_ good throughput (aka: Logistic Bots), its so effective that a huge subset of the community thinks that its cheating.

Leaving 1000 items on a belt (aka: a belt of length 70) is just less effective than bots flying to fetch an item _just_ when you need it. The buffer is counter-productive.

-------

The only time you want to "buffer" in Factorio is to provide 12-items to stack inserters, to maximize UPS (updates per second). If your stack inserters are moving 12-items every swing, that's using less CPU power than if they're moving 6 or 5 items per swing.

And as we all know: the expert's biggest problem in Factorio is when you've built such a large factory that your own CPU starts to slow down (aka: UPS problems). So buffers of size 50 come to the rescue (the smallest buffer available, and just enough to take advantage of 12-item stack inserters).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#195

Post by rsj_hn »

Grakel wrote: post #191
legitster wrote: post #158

No, no, no! Stockpiling is not a solution to a bottleneck! In the grand scheme of things, having a couple weeks of extra inventory on hand will not help you weather a 100 year storm. But it will increase waste - inventory that you have to throw away when there are defects or when they become obsolete. Imagine trying to predict the run on lumber, and the solution was to have kept a bunch of lumber sitting in yards rot…

Quite the opposite, the lumber industry has been selling greener and wetter wood year after year. If they would stockpile the quality would increase, and they could build a cushion to fluctuating demand.

I've noticed this with musical instruments, and it sucks. This has been a chronic problem with Gibson guitars, but also even small scale luthiers are being hurt.

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/adam-jones-i-told-gibso...

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#196

Post by tuatoru »

The_Beta wrote: post #146
015a wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his statement is that founder (and family) led businesses are the only businesses capable of building the shock absorbers necessary to weather hundred-year storms; not that they always will. By comparison, committee-appointed CEOs rarely, if ever, will, because they cannot.

It's not that they cannot. They don't have an incentive to do it. If I'm being paid for my performance while I'm a CEO, why would I spend money today (and hurt my performance today) to fix a problem that MIGHT affect the company in 20 years

To align incentives, perhaps we should have a law specifying that executive stock options can only be exercised after a delay of 17 years or more.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#198

Post by xyzzyz »

ladyattis wrote: post #67
evilotto wrote: post #33

He's right to point out that the obsession with RoE is a big part of the problem. He's wrong to suggest that the billionaire class and founders will solve the problem if we only trust them and let them keep their money. Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system, they just call it "disruptive innovation" by which they mean tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out p…

Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…

> Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand.

Billionaires have relatively very little cash in hand. Their billions typically are in form of business equity, and so they very much care of the businesses go into shock.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#199

Post by [deleted] »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #46
silent_cal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden

This kind of comment is extremely unproductive. The idea of Sweden has no connection at all to the topic at hand. You are using the word "Sweden" to make an argument because you believe the connection between Sweden and conversations about lockdowns is so clear that the mere mention of the word is enough to bring the entire argument into someone else's mind. So, this demonstrates that you believe everybody reading th…

[deleted]

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#200

Post by ajmurmann »

amelius wrote: post #155
ladyattis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. They'll never go back to pre-ROE days because they'd have to live with less money and worse less control. While they still have personal reserves in the billions they can decide the fate of their ventures but if say 20% of their current cash was on the balance sheets of corporations with boa…

> Yep, the capital owning class just doesn't care if their businesses go into shock because they already have their cash in hand. What if there was inflation?

AND Ryan's point about taxing unrealized capital gains was that it forces founders to divest over time. Which one is it?
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