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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#291

Post by ethbr0 »

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…

> GM and the rest of Detroit got their rear ends handed to them by the Japanese and their application of JIT

GM and the rest of Detroit got their rear ends handed to them because they'd underinvested in fuel-efficient engine designs (the lost 70s) and grown lazy in reliability.

Lean manufacturing may have allowed Japanese manufacturers to price more competitively and be more agile, but at the end of the day, they increased their sales because they made better cars.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#292

Post by rsj_hn »

throw0101a wrote: post #286
darawk wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is the point, though. The point is that Amazon wouldn't have achieved what it has if Bezos was forced to slowly divest control of his company over the last two decades. Bezos does not have his cash in hand, for the most part. To the extent that he does have cash in hand, he has already paid taxes on that cash. To the extent that he has not paid taxes on his wealth, he is fully incentivized by the share p…

> Bezos does not have his cash in hand, for the most part. To the extent that he does have cash in hand, he has already paid taxes on that cash. What a lot of high wealthy individuals are doing is using their portfolios as collateral against lines of credit. The LOCs give them cash to fund their lifestyle, and they don't have to liquidate their portfolios and take the capital gains charges (at least in the short-term…

Pretty sure many in the middle class do the exact same thing. That's the whole idea behind mortgages, auto loans, etc -- to fund consumption on credit and pay the interest with income.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#293

Post by shagie »

legutierr wrote: post #224
mfer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply c…

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global…

(tangent)

> One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global integration was promoted and pursued in the first place by many policy makers—in order to make such wars less likely to occur.

That's a topic explored a bit in The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi. I found it am amusing read (and actually liked Wil Wheaton as a narrator for it... though not everyone agrees on that point).

The teaser for the first book of the series:

> Our universe is ruled by physics, and faster-than-light travel is not possible - until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transports us to other worlds, around other stars.

> Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war - and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#295

Post by Swenrekcah »

xyzzyz wrote: post #285
Swenrekcah wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is kind of to the point, they have more money on hand than a small country’s budget and even if they lose it all it almost doesn’t make a dent in their net worth. In this situation it is almost reasonable to want a small crisis to shake out your upcoming competitors and buy some more land or other things of real value at a discount.

> Which is kind of to the point, they have more money on hand than a small country’s budget They don’t, though, that’s the entire point. > and even if they lose it all it almost doesn’t make a dent in their net worth. > In this situation it is almost reasonable to want a small crisis to shake out your upcoming competitors and buy some more land or other things of real value at a discount. A small crisis will in fact…

Unless the billionaire in question is extremely vain, they should absolutely want some of their paper wealth to vanish temporarily since it is an opportunity to accrue more real value stuff at a discount for those that have large amounts of either cash or cash equivalents on hand. All of their paper wealth will appear again in the next upswing.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#296

Post by ironSkillet »

gruez wrote: post #278
munificent wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The millions of people who lost their jobs and had to rely on emergency cash payments from the government to pay for food and rent?

How does this have anything to do with the claim that it was "best years for most big businesses"? Do "most big businesses" do better when that happens?

There were two quantified subjects in the quote you referenced - "biggest shock to economy" and "best years for most big businesses". My guess is he was replying about the first subject.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#297

Post by AussieWog93 »

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…

> Founders have just as much incentive to optimize the excess out of the system ... tweaking how the system works so that they can squeeze out profit for themselves.

So do workers, to be fair. The goal of workers in purchasing departments and HR isn't to make the business more efficient but to propagate a cushy lifestyle for themselves and their mates.

To an extent, that same misalignment exists in all classes of worker, including engineers.

SWEs are probably the worst at this; so many of the problems that we solve don't have anything to do with squeezing the most performance out of the hardware or reducing technical debt. Instead, a huge chunk of our time is spent on man-made bullshit that sysadmins don't solve properly because otherwise they'd be out of a job.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#298

Post by rytill »

bhelkey wrote: post #177
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.

> 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. A shortage in real life causes critical issues for real people. A shortage in Factorio does not.

Do you have an actual refutation though? Why does buffering perform better in real-world factories than the simulated ones in Factorio?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#299

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr0 wrote: post #287
revolvingocelot wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's still in his best interest to ensure that the economy doesn't crash Technically, yeah! Functionally, though, if the Even Greater Depression arrived tomorrow? He'd still be the richest man alive, and probably even more powerful than he already is right now thanks to how Amazon and AWS would get to take over more failing social institutions. Sure, a falling tide lowers all boats, but Bezos will still comfortably…

> He'd still be the richest man alive, and probably even more powerful than he already is right now thanks to how Amazon and AWS would get to take over more failing social institutions. Bezos isn't even the richest person alive today. That would be Musk. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/elon-musk-is-now-n...

[deleted]

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#300

Post by rsj_hn »

xyzzyz wrote: post #290
wavefunction wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point is that Amazon wouldn't have achieved what it has Sounds good to me.

Fortunately, you don’t get to decide that. Contrary to popular sentiment on HN, Amazon is one of the most favorably perceived brand by Americans, ranked top 4 in 2020. When you go against Amazon, you go against something that Americans like more than Netflix.

This is interesting:

https://tenetpartners.com/top100/most-powerful-brands-list.h...

Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft all in the top 10.

Exxon way more popular than Netflix.

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