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What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

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Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#491

Post by Dylan16807 »

onion2k wrote: post #54
55873445216111 wrote: post #23

Must also take into account that many industrial processes are not easily restartable. Even if only shut down for 1 day or 1 week, it can take multiples of that length of time to ramp back up to 100% output rate. Complex factories do not switch on and off like a lightswitch.

My dad worked on some testing software for a float glass factory back in the 1980s. Float glass is a process where a factory makes a continuous sheet of glass that floats on a river of molten tin, about 3 meters wide, 24 hours a day. It never stops. If it does then the glass cools down and solidifies inside the machinery, and the factory needs to be practically scrapped and rebuilt. I imagine that's the worst case sc…

> It never stops. If it does then the glass cools down and solidifies inside the machinery

That's why you can't just flip a switch to turn it off. But what if you stop feeding glass in and wait half a day first?

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#492

Post by dismalpedigree »

starky wrote: post #466

This is maybe half right. The demand for short term maximization of profits over all others is really driven by being a public company and shareholders only being satisfied if they see gains that exceed the market even at the detriment of the long term viability of the company. The US stock market is better at accepting risk of than my country (Canada) where companies are really harshly punished by shareholders if th…

If you think public markets are bad at creating poor long term incentives (they are) you should see what private equity does. 10x worse.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#493

Post by m0zg »

philwelch wrote: post #444
whatever1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

As well as the fact that taxing unrealized gains would have to come with _issuing tax rebates_ for unrealized losses - something the government would find difficult to do in the case of a systemic economic downturn a-la 2008. And then there's the fact that you aren't really creating any new revenue by taxing unrealized gains if they are going to be, at some point, realized. Last I checked shares of stock aren't very useful as a payment instrument in the general case, nor would IRS accept them as taxes.

This is a cynical ploy to the part of the populace that can't tell a portfolio from a hole in the ground, and there seem to be surprisingly many of such people.

Also, to address GP's comment - Apple would then buy back all outstanding stock and destroy it, dramatically driving up the share price for folks who haven't sold.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#494

Post by bongoman37 »

quadrangle wrote: post #479
EdwardDiego wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of paper towels, or disposable nappies, is removing the labour cost of cleaning them. My ex-wife was a stay at home Mom for her religious reasons, and was determined to be the "best" Mom, only healthy food, no TV or devices, cloth nappies etc. Once we hit kid #3, the time needed to launder cloth nappies wasn't viable with two other kids on the go. I encouraged her to give disposables a go, and she was…

Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently. We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine. Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper go…

Yea, I found this odd that kids in US used diapers well above 2 years. I found a lot of kids potty trained in India around one. My kid's day care prohibited diapers for kids above 18 months!

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#495

Post by leetcrew »

rytill wrote: post #298
bhelkey wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

the short answer is the real world is a lot more complicated and random than factorio. factorio is pretty complex for a video game, but trivial compared to a real world supply chain. most of the game mechanics are deterministic, and latencies are measured in minutes rather than weeks. you can analytically solve for how much iron ore you will need in the next hour, what the optimal ratio of copper wire to plastic bar assemblers is for a circuit factory, etc. unless you play with friends, there are no pesky humans to interfere with your perfectly optimized design.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#496

Post by xenadu02 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #186

How 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…

We just bought a house in SF, closed end of July. Furniture of all kinds is backordered... in some cases severely (think 26+ weeks).

Daily necessities are doing fine and most products aren't completely unavailable, but prices & lead times are increasing. There's a finite amount of time that can continue though... if companies can't get new delivery trucks or locomotive engines then eventually that will have a significant impact.

FWIW some companies have managed things much better. Our new Tesla Model Y was delivered in a bit under three months. Compared to what some auto makers are doing that's a miracle.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#497

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

majormajor wrote: post #438
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.

Yes, eventually. From what I've read it's expected to take 6 months to a year after your "people believe there's a predictable level of demand" point.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#498

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

dragontamer wrote: post #370
ankeshk wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not played Factorio but love your argument. Very thought provoking. What happens if something in the middle breaks and you don't have a buffer? What happens if there is no iron shortage but the steel furnace blows up? Aren't buffers important in such situations?

> What happens if something in the middle breaks and you don't have a buffer? What happens if there is no iron shortage but the steel furnace blows up? Aren't buffers important in such situations? Okay, lets have two factories that convert 5-iron into 1-steel (Factorio ratio): * "Buffer Factory": requiring 7000 steel to buffer up / 35000 iron before working at full capacity. * "JIT Factory" : requires 200 steel to bu…

Your initial example is not making an argument against buffers in the supply chain, but against large production runs requiring large inputs. In the context of logistics, I think of a buffer as a system that slowly fills up due to excess capacity greater than demand, which can be drawn down in times when demand exceeds production. You seem to be referring to a buffer as a process which requires large inputs to get start producing. Ironically, a buffer as I use the term would decrease the 175s startup time for your "buffered" factory.

In real life, factories/farms/hospitals are not designed to agilely shut down and start up again while awaiting inputs, or when there is no demand for the output. Upon a drop in inputs the company goes bankrupt, the crop doesn't get planted, or the patient dies. Upon a drop in demand the company goes bankrupt, the crop gets thrown out, or the travel nurses go elsewhere. Where flexibility in supplies is not an option, the solution is to have a buffer of money (or credit), seed, or medical supplies to smooth out anticipated supply shocks, and we buffer against demand shocks with money/credit, features markets, storage facilities, and some hospital inefficiency.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#499

Post by StanislavPetrov »

This is the inevitable result of globalization and prioritizing profits and efficiency among all else. Redundancy and reserve capacity are costly. When you create a supply chain that is designed for maximum efficiency and minimum cost, by definition you are creating a supply chain that is fragile and incredibly interdependent. This is not a system that is built to withstand serious disruption, it is a system built to maximize profits. Whether it comes to masks, drugs, food or toilet paper, I hope these supply chain issues (and resulting shortages) will wake people up to the threats we face from our fragile trade system.

Re: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

#500

Post by dendrite9 »

patrickyeon wrote: post #83

> 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…

This is something that is interesting to me, I have been reading about various ideas for worker owned companies. Some friends and I have been talking about how we might organize a side business built around a similar structure and where it might fail for reasons that are not just the business side of things.

This climbing equipment company's stated values are an appealing target to me right now. https://www.totemmt.com/about-us/

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