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Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of U.S. companies
- brink 7y agoOn the bright side, a disruption in supply may teach us what we really need, and what we don't need. Maybe after this breakout we'll realize the importance of slowing down, consuming less, and resting more.
- azinman2 7y agoWhich will lead to massive layoffs, starting with the most vulnerable (small businesses, hourly workers, etc)
- core-questions 7y agoWhich will lead to an explosion of available labour, ready for hiring when things pick back up. The issue is whether governments will step in to provide sufficient unemployment / welfare benefits to bridge the gap.
- azinman2 7y agoAhh yes, the benefits of mass unemployment and businesses shuttering! Always look on the bright side of life! https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M
- brink 7y agoThere's the other extreme as well - being a cynic in all circumstances will leave you consistently feeling burnt out.
- lihaciudaniel 7y agoCynicism is the most authentic character that one can take in these circumstances
- Scoundreller 7y agoFinally, a 24-hour work week.
- sudosysgen 7y agoHopefully this will lead to the realization that most labour is in fact useless, and a normalization of that fact would be an incredible step forward, which will enable us to increase our quality of life by working less while sparing the environment. It probably won't happen.
- adrianN 7y agoIt will also lead to less CO2 emissions.
- esarbe 7y agoSo, your argument for continuing the current, unsustainable, unfair and in the long run suicidal economic model is that the most vulnerable - given the current economic system - would suffer? To me it sounds like a perfect reason to rethink the current economic model.
- airstrike 7y agoI'm mostly hoping people start taking their flu shots...
- BacioiuC 7y agoYou know the flu shot is not going to help right? Different virus.
- bart_spoon 7y agoIt helps people not get severe cases of the flu, which means fewer healthcare resources, like hospital beds and medical personnel, being devoted to severe flu cases and more can be devoted to severe coronavirus cases.
- BacioiuC 7y agoIn this regard, you are right, sorry. I'm just tired of hearing people around me going "I had my shots, I'm going to that party / going to that event" or "It's just a flu, nothing to worry about".
- thysultan 7y agoI for one wouldn't visit a hospital unless i really needed to, considering it is the most high risk place of catching it from. People going to the hospital "presumably" sick only to come out of it with the virus is a popular tale out of wuhan.
- jsjddbbwj 7y agoI'm pissed off the iPhone 9 won't come out. With time I will get more pissed off.
- metalliqaz 7y agoThis is the most absurdly entitled thing I have read today.
- MS90 7y agoIt's not even about a super fancy phone either, it's the bargain bin version of the iPhone.
- jsjddbbwj 7y agoI don't eat bats and I don't travel, so I don't see why it's fair that I should be affected by this.
- metalliqaz 7y agooh I see, you're just a troll. carry on, then
- christiansakai 7y agoI'm not sure why are you down-voted. I think slowing down, consuming less, is generally good for the whole Earth and its inhabitants.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tmpz22 7y agoPretty sure the downvotes are for ignoring the elephant in the room, if we have a prolonged recession a lot of people in the US are completely fucked from losing healthcare and from losing the paycheck that they depend on. Most Americans do not have an emergency fund.
- londons_explore 7y agoI'd like to think that if there is a recession, there are still the same number of people, and there are still the same number of hospital beds. Hospitals will just reduce their prices, because it's preferable to do that than leave beds empty.
- tmpz22 7y agoThe problem isn't admittance or treatment the problem is the bill that comes in the mail 6 months later, as well as massive decline in spending, decline in social interactions, decline in nutritional choices, and the injection of the 2020 political circus towards the end of the year (in the US).
- Scoundreller 7y agoAll solvable problems. Even in a recession. With political will...
- astronautjones 7y ago> All solvable problems. Even in a recession. With political will... I have some bad news.
- pengaru 7y agoBecause that's what happens in the aftermath of a scarcity event; all those people who were hung out to dry don't push harder for more in the future, and those who had it all decide to take less. This strikes me as child-level naivete.
- Notorious_BLT 7y agoI'll tell you what I do really need: one pack of toilet paper, because I just happened to be running out of my last Costco pack right now. Trying to make whats left last. Maybe now is the time to buy a bidet add-on seat.
- bdcravens 7y agoI had a phone stolen a couple of weeks ago, and initially I was trying to buy a new phone outright (ended up filing a claim and having my new one overnighted, but lack of SMS access would have prevented me from doing my job, hence the urgency). None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain), but Best Buy did.
- listsfrin 7y agoI waited a whole month for a Macbook Pro with 256 RAM. Before the "crisis". The apocalypse is near.
- wcoenen 7y agoBut the maximum is 64GB RAM? https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
- mitchty 7y agoIt is now yep! 32GiB was the prior max.
- londons_explore 7y agoNot 256 G of RAM... Just 256 RAM. I bet the delay is they're having trouble getting it to boot...
- beaunative 7y agoHaving to waiting for a fancy laptop to arrive is hardly "the apocalyps". It's what people used to do.
- throwaway_Bees 7y ago>None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain) That may be true...but it may be just as likely they are minimizing their own inventory to keep their own costs down/cash on hand, which is not something they would freely tell their own employees or customers.
- b34r 7y agoI hope it doesn’t screw up our food supply too much. We get a surprising amount of crops from China and the rest of the world.
- ztratar 7y agoThe US exports a massive amount of crops to China, not vice versa. US Agriculture Exports to China = $25B US Agriculture Imports from China = $5B Source: https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline-files/profilechina.pdf https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline-files...
- Normal_gaussian 7y ago5b is a lot. A large quantity of imports will be used to make US domestic food as well. The exported good is not the same as the imported one.
- youngprogrammer 7y agoAnecdote: Our caterer in silicon valley said there was a supply issue for tofu.
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoSo I guess they import the beans, manufacture the tofu, then ship it back to us? Sounds inefficient, though I'm not sure how much demand there is for a large-scale domestic tofu manufacturing industry in the US.
- neaden 7y agoUS Tofu is by and large for animal feed or oil, not tofu.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
- hardtokill 7y agoWe really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively funneling uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migrants who aren’t coming back. If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world.
- pogbatea 7y agoOh yes, make american great again.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoChina is a major exporter to a lot of countries, so the same sentiment applies to them, too. More like, make the world great again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoHow did China "sabotage" Italy & South Korea? Italy & South Korea had ample time to ban travel to & from China, given how China was handling Coronavirus. They chose not to. China is free to make decisions handing an epidemic. We are free to criticize how they handle it. We were free to implement travel restrictions. We chose not to. China didn't strike us with a bioweapon. We did nothing to stop a novel virus from spreading, and it spread. That's what happens.
- elicash 7y agoWorth noting that even we today still haven't banned all travel from China and doing so FULLY is not really a great option unless we did a ton of other things first. We're still having goods imported from China and there are folks actually BRINGING those goods here. Our healthcare system currently depends on imported items, for just one example. China is mostly where we get our antibiotics. I don't disagree with your broader point.
- dumbfoundded 7y agoThis has happened to my company and a few others I know. We have about $15K of packaging stuck in China. If this is doing anything (to me personally), it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.
- beaunative 7y ago"In many cases, the prices aren't really that different." I beg to differ. To be precise, for trade/production companies, even a 30% difference in price would be huge. But if you only buy souvenirs or gift wrappings etc, those might not matter that much, as they might just be less tha 1% in the final price of whatever you're selling. but for some companies or industries, it means 30% cheaper in terms of all their material and products, which would be insane increase for their profits.
- core-questions 7y agoThis is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term, and may also result in moving some manufacturing jobs back to the US. As the standard of living rises in China, labour costs will increase until eventually the only way it will really be cheaper to do things over there is because of either better logistics, or lax environmental/labour laws that enable shortcuts we can't/won't take here. The latter is something we could reasonably tariff or tax (considering how popular the idea of a carbon tax is amongst progressive folks, this shouldn't be too hard of a sell).
- taiwanboy 7y agoMexico wages are already lower than wages in China. In fact, chinalawblog.com talks a lot about companies shifting to Mexico due to USMCA and short turnaround for supply chain. https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/international-manufacturing-update-china-down-mexico-up.html https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/international-manufactu...
- baby 7y agoHP did exactly this
- hardtokill 7y agoWe really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively Forcing uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migrants who aren’t coming back. And China hasn’t even apologized yet! If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world. Many people I know will not buy from China again unless they absolutely have to
- octonion 7y agoThe US is literally doing the exact same thing right now.
- smbullet 7y agoSource?
- tunesmith 7y agoI'd really like to start seeing less of this sort of comment on Hacker News. It's not even close to literally true.
- monocasa 7y agoThe Republican talking points right now are that coronavirus doesn't really matter, and it's being blown up as a democratic attempt to have an election year topic. When all my Republican family is spouting the same BS, that means it's being pushed hard in the soft right wing information channels. EDIT: Even NBC news is hinting that government policies are getting in the way of determining real corona virus infection rates. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-y-gov-cuomo-questions-low-rate-coronavirus-testing-u-n1155331 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-y-gov-cuomo-questions... The number of tested individuals are only about 2x the number of confirmed cases. Not a great margin of error.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zkms 7y agoThis is the cruel and predictable result of a society that has meticulously and senselessly offshored/outsourced most its industrial capacity. If your country can't manufacture, from raw materials, all the electrical/electronic/mechanical components, the tooling, the equipment, and the chemicals (industrial and pharmaceutical alike) it needs to keep everything running, you're dependent on these hyper-fragile and convoluted supply chains that are optimized for cost above everything. This isn't a "China vs US" thing; i bear zero ill will towards China and their massive gain of industrial capacity, my ire is solely focused towards those in power (government and industry alike) who presided over the suicidal deindustrialization of the United States and Europe. The net result is that it's China who's able to send medical aid (ventilators, masks, respirators, test kits, etc) to Italy, and not the US, if only because the US is incapable of meeting its own needs: https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675 https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoAssuming that this travels into the country wouldn't the same impact be observed as areas of the country with particular specializations were affected? I don't know how one could prevent supply chain disruptions, they'd just come a little later than sooner.
- mc32 7y agoBut if most industrialized countries had retained their mfg expertise some factories would be active while some idle and there could be some kind of staggered affect as the interruption courses it’s way in and out.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoSo wouldn't the answer to this also be to just move the industrial base to various other developing countries? If we split our manufacturing between more of South East Asia, South America, and Africa, wouldn't that have the same effect?
- lihaciudaniel 7y agoFinally we can discuss politics on HN!
- howmayiannoyyou 7y ago"It's better to be in a bad deal with good people, then a good deal with bad people" China MFG was/is not a deal with the Chinese people. It's a deal with the CCP. Those of us who always understood this aren't surprised by any of this. We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well and we watched helplessly as they exported that risk abroad in the form of pollution, SARS, contaminated products and more. You may not be a citizen of China, but you're almost as impacted by their decisions. This is worth pondering.
- tanilama 7y ago> We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire. I think a lot of people's takeways will be different than yours: China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable assets to global investors.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mullingitover 7y ago> Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire. It's not time to start popping champagne bottles in China quite yet. They have a tiger by the tail. The country is shut down, and as they start rolling back travel restrictions it could easily blow up again. They still have well over a billion people who are vulnerable. They just tried rolling back travel restrictions two days ago and immediately reversed course[1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-qianjiang/chinese-city-in-hubei-reverses-relaxation-policy-to-continue-transport-ban-idUSKBN20Y09U?il=0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
- unityByFreedom 7y agoPlus who knows if the current numbers from China are accurate. They could still be underreporting as the world focuses elsewhere, we only have the CCP to go by.
- dghughes 7y agoHere in Canada we had nation-wide disruptions for weeks due to rail service being blocked by First Nations (American Indian) people protesting a pipeline. The covid-19 virus just compounded that problem. I'm in an isolated rural town and even Walmart has bare shelves.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- every 7y agoApparently cheap has a price...
- tanilama 7y agoI used to be a globalist myself, which I still am, but I think globalization needs its urgent refactoring. Not all industries need to be fully globalized, and it is better every country keep some share of production to itself to account for emergency situation like this virus. Globalization had trade off robustness for efficiency, it is time to scale that back.
- Scoundreller 7y ago“Centralize production/operations in China” is the opposite of globalization.
- tanilama 7y agoI think globalization doesn't mean equally distribution. Globalization as how it operates, it means to assign the job to whichever country that is most cost-efficient for that part of the production.
- lildoggo 7y agoI once took a college course based entirely on answering the question 'What is globalization' Globalization can be just about any interaction between two entities... Moving production to China? Globalization Moving production back to the US? Globalization ... Anti-globalization movement? Globalization Or maybe my professor was just nuts, I feel crazy typing this out
- skissane 7y agoYesterday I had this couple who do pool servicing out to look at some issues with our swimming pool. They told me their usual salt supplier has run out of salt. The salt supplier usually imports salt from China (to Australia), but the supplier has a shipping container full of salt they've ordered stuck in China and not sure when it will actually make it to Australia. (They explained domestic Australian-made salt is still available, but it is 30% more expensive than the Chinese import salt.)
- jrs95 7y agoI can't be the only one that isn't even worried about getting sick, but is worried the economic damage could be bad enough to impact my job.
- krtong 7y agoThis is why you produce things domestically. We're at wartime. Alexander Hamilton understood this. George Washington understood this. This is going to be a turning point in globalization and offshoring things that will compromise our economy and ultimately undermine national security.
- agoodthrowaway 7y agoChina is back online. It was just a bump in the road.