Efficiency is better for the environment than stockpiling.
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
441–450 of 690 posts
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#442Is Twitter the best place for such analyses? They're stream of consciousness sentences and paragraphs, not cohesive narrative essays.
Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The Tweets I read each day? They're single-serving books.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#443No, 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…
the wood in my house is over 100 years old and is still in good shape. Stored properly, wood lasts very long. but i get your overall point. A balance has to be struck between too much and too little inventory...
You can see wooden constructions in european churches hundreds of years old & possibly even older in many temples and shrines in Japan.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#444The buried lede is an assertion that a tax on unrealized capital gains will cause reduced private ownership of large companies, resulting in a reduced ability to handle 100-year flood events. Along the way, there are a bunch of other assertions that serve as prerequisites, like the idea that these companies can cultivate better employee loyalty and plan for longer horizons. How much do we know about how true that is,…
“cause reduced private ownership of large companies, resulting in a reduced ability to handle 100-year flood events.” How the market speculation on the value of a company can affect its resiliency ? If tomorrow everyone sold Apple stock for 1 cent, why would Apple the company care ? Same revenue, same costs. Give me a break with the importance of the stock casino.
That wouldn’t be a problem.
The problem would be if tomorrow everyone sold Apple stock for $1000, and the government took that as a reason to tax every Apple shareholder for “income” of over $800 per share in the stock casino, forcing Apple’s current shareholders to divest themselves to new shareholders and hence lose control of the company.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would impact Apple's ability to raise money on the stock market tho.
Don't they have 250 billion in Ireland or something? What money do big companies need to raise?
> What money do big companies need to raise?
For example, to buy some company to improve their business. They can do that in cash or they can issue more shares, e.g. with their Beats acquisition.
> On May 28, 2014, Apple officially announced its intention to acquire Beats Electronics for $3 billion—with $400 million to be paid in Apple stock and the remainder in cash.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#446> Only founder led companies and family owned businesses can stand up to the immense pressure from the dogmas of modern finance. How about worker-owned companies, co-operatives, and collectives? I totally agree the problem is that with the finance people steering the ship there's incentives to push up your short-term performance and collect bonuses and watch your publically-traded stock value go up. So don't go publi…
The fact that there are so few of these types of company around probably means that they have trouble surviving in a world where the competition is supported by modern finance.
Can you have a cooperative with limited liability? I'm sure you can emulate it with a limited company and particular arrangements of stock ownership and voting rights, but I doubt that's easy or cheap to set up.
The John Lewis Partnership in the UK is a public limited company whose shares are entirely owned by a trust that pays shares of profits to all of its employees, which isn't quite "ownership" but close, and they have a $15bn revenue. Publix Super Markets in the US has a $45bn revenue and is privately owned with all employees receiving stock.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/051316/6-succ...
Financing is probably an issue at a certain level but it doesn't seem to be limiting otherwise. They're just unusual, although if you consider startups giving employees a stake isn't that strange today.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#447The average lifespan of a company is 10 years.[0] The average lifespan of companies on the S&P is maybe a little more than twice that. Each year you have a 1/100 chance of seeing a hundred year flood. With a short lifespan the odds are decent that your company simply won’t see one. The question is then: how good of an idea is it to spend to be robust to them? Of course it is viciously circular: planning to not be rob…
I agree with this more than Ryan Peterson.
Governments need to be built up to handle 100 year floods. Businesses standard life time don't last long enough to spend a ton of resources on betting towards those kinds of time scales.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#448All 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. paper towels: strictly non-essential items, yes, but it takes some lifestyle reconfiguration to make the alternatives work. My household is (I speculate asymptotically) approaching zero paper towel use, but we have ready access to laundry, the capital and bandwidth to have built up a comfortable supply of rags and towels, and our only occasionally messy coinhabitant is the cat (and you can bet that if he vomits, I'm using a paper towel to clean it up).
We can make the conscious choice to reduce our dependence on disposable products, but at some point (for everyone, for every "easy" solution x) it's not worth reducing any more.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#449On the other hand, sometimes, it's straight ahead bad luck. A chip we use in one of our products is made in a semiconductor fab in Malaysia. It's the only place in the world that makes the chip. That fab has been shut down for about 6 months as the nation struggles with COVID. In the meantime, the inventory in the supply chain, and even customer warehouses, has been picked clean by brokers to be re-sold for high-cost…
its not bad luck when you buy something thats only made one place on the planet.
Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?
#450How bad are the supply chain bottlenecks really? Compared to the amount of discussion on the matter they seem pretty minimal outside a couple sectors. I certainly don't see any lack of products being sold at grocery and big box stores. The only exception I see are some hot items like GPUs and game consoles but I don't they the supply chain itself is the constraint but rather the actual silicon. The only significant e…
Raw materials are seeing issues, which is trickling down to nearly everything. Metal costs have gone up >25% from what I've seen, plastics are nearly impossible to get from the large suppliers, etc.
Many electronics components are majorly supply constrained right now, is isn't just silicon components, passives also have shortages everywhere.