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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#431

Post by Gigachad »

arendtio wrote: post #210
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…

Even if you are right, what would be your solution? I mean, the problem is not that we lack transparency, but that we have run out of options to fight the bottlenecks. Having some stockpiles as buffers would be one options to fight the problem.

The solution is to wait. It's better to wait out very rare events than to waste constantly during normal periods.

Very few people _need_ to have their new GPU or PS5 right now.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#432

Post by kurthr »

cbdumas wrote: post #314

All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…

I think the difficulty in making that case is that expenditures are in $ not functional units. So what you may be seeing is more higher prices (a symptom of supply chain breakdown) not more purchases, while services largely stayed similar in price and similar in volume (to slightly down due to extra money spent on pricy goods).

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#433

Post by spiralx »

gruez wrote: post #227
philwelch wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. I count 13 global pandemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology

what's your methodology? The linked section includes stuff like the "2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic", which was "worldwide" but had a death toll of 53 people. Should that be considered a pandemic? If we go with the "Epidemics and pandemics with at least 1 million deaths" table, there's only 6 worldwide pandemics.

An epidemic is an unexpected rise in cases within a community or region, which could mean part of a country, an entire country, an ethnic group spread across multiple countries, or an entire landmass. And a pandemic is an epidemic that has exponential growth.

An epidemic usually starts within a particular country and if it becomes a pandemic it will grow rapidly and spread to other countries, but the WHO definitions are only based on the number of cases compared to normal and how fast the number of cases is rising.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#434

Post by dpweb »

cbdumas wrote: post #314

All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…

Frankly, people buy a lot of stuff they don't need. But I wonder how the dependence on disposable items plays in. I could never understand stressing one bit about the most disposable items like paper towels. Completely non-essential items.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#437

Post by ethbr0 »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #377
ethbr0 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Feh, you're right -- I hadn't looked at the leaderboards lately. While that mistake makes me look stupid, I don't think it detracts significantly from what I was trying to say.

It happened when Tesla stock shot up 12%.

I guess my read is that if Bezos got his title from a company that didn't exist, in modern, sell-everything form, until 22 years ago... (and in +AWS form, until 19 years ago)

And if the current holder got his title from a company that didn't have a physical product until 12 years ago...

It's probably a bad bet to say "Obviously, these people are going to be the richest forever."

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#438

Post by majormajor »

cbdumas wrote: post #314

All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…

> If the spending doesn't re-balance again as restrictions are lifted this is not a temporary supply chain issue caused by just-in-time methodology, it's just the new normal.

Even if spending stays shifted supply will be able to catch up eventually. Once people believe there's a predictable level of demand they will be able to plan output for it - or else someone else will capture that new market share.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#439

Post by jasonhansel »

> The proposed tax on unrealized capital gains will force founders to sell larger and larger pieces of their companies to pay the tax, until eventually they lose control of their businesses and turn them over to the Wall Street sharks to run their disastrous playbook.

Are the billionaire founders actually better--on a societal level--than the "Wall Street sharks" he's complaining about?

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