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We seem to be entering a global version of The Beer Game (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distributi
by lifeisstillgood 6y ago
We seem to be entering a global version of The Beer Game (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game). The game is a training session on supply chain co-ordination designed to show effects of trying to order beer and bottles months ahead of time then demand changes etc. It's mostly chaos
(I was speaking to someone who has seen their shipping from China to Europe quintuple - apparently all the containers stayed in Europe as no one wanted to send them back empty.)
The game is designed to show that "local" signals aren't always indicative of full system - the example being that retailers etc are stockpiling right now on-shore. But this creates more demand than usual, slowing delivery. So the naive retailer will say "OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order 4 months supply ... and so it goes - an infinite bug methodology.
- myself248 6y agoHeh. I was just about to ask if this was another term for the bullwhip effect, and the page actually links right to it. I think the overall effect is that we all have to get used to things being scarce or spotty for a while, that's all. The era of perfect infinite next-day availability of everything has come to a pause. Be patient, adjust expectations, make do, and give the system time to recover. And wherever possible, buy local, buy on-shore.
- nemo44x 6y agoThank god for long books and summer weather.
- menomatter 6y agoThank God for living and growing up in Syria. We are expert at living with scarcity
- xwolfi 6y agoThank God for living in China. We are expert at doing it ourselves with just an email with a blueprint :D
- h0l0cube 6y agoAnd an onshore manufacturing capability that the world gave up on and delegated to your country of living. Protectionism's best advert has been the logistics disruption of Covid and the recent breakdown in diplomatic relations between the West and China
- breischl 6y agoThis is pretty true. I think this whole thing has been an argument for a low across-the-board tariff, to internalize the risk of supply chain disruptions.
- avidiax 6y agoMaybe a tariff inversely related to domestic production of the good and directly related to its necessity. If your country produces zero units of a necessity (e.g. 7nm silicon), the tariff should be high. Zero units of beanie babies, low tariff.
- tastyfreeze 6y agoAgreed, tariffs should be used as a tool to price the risk of losing that supply chain.
- waheoo 6y agoI can feel the salt on those downvotes to AP. Not his fault he grew up in a country the rest of the world thought they were taking advantage of.
- runawaybottle 6y agoGood thing everything I really want to buy is several hundred thousand dollars (houses and shit). I suppose I’ll make do without the latest doldrum, as usual.
- irrational 6y agoYou are paying way too much for your manure.
- iab 6y agoWho is your manure guy
- arthurcolle 6y agoGot kicked off of Twitter, now we have to in-house all our manure operations
- sneak 6y ago> And wherever possible, buy local, buy on-shore. Organic, local 7nm microprocessors only.
- iab 6y agoFoundry-to-tower
- aksss 6y agoFree-range and gas-fed, baby!
- bowmessage 6y agonon-GMOSFET
- lostlogin 6y agoSeasonal too.
- dv_dt 6y agoOne problem is that many economists will look at the resulting price inflation and treat as money supply inflation, and call on less government spending and tighter lending when really we need time and serious covid treatments for the logistics to settle down.
- eloff 6y agoGiven the insane money supply inflation happening now, I'll put that in the pluses column.
- mschuster91 6y agoI agree the money supply inflation is scary but that's only because it doesn't end up in the real economy - most of it ends up in the stock markets propping up share prices. Actually using the freshly minted money to do stuff like infrastructure investments - no matter what, across the Western countries all kinds of infra are derelict - would cause an instant trickle-down effect since almost all of that is manual hard labor.
- eloff 6y agoDoesn't end up in the real economy yet. Give it time, money doesn't stay where you spend it. Buying bonds gives money to the bond holders. In today's market, they probably buy stocks with that money, but then that goes to the stock holders. Which are a range of characters, some of whom will take that money and put it into the real economy.
- mschuster91 6y ago> Doesn't end up in the real economy yet. Give it time, money doesn't stay where you spend it. The bailout money from 2008ff still hasn't "trickled down" to the people, over a decade later. Trickle down only works when the amount of layers between the initial receivers of money and the intended recipients is as close to 1 as possible. Hiring a construction firm to build a road and mandating a decent wage for employees in the tender is the most efficient way for that.
- FpUser 6y agoBuy on-shore - COVID kind of fucked it up. I used to ignore Amazon until there was no other choice. Now it is Amazon mostly and I do not think my habit will return unless Amazon itself morphs into something different. Buy local - I afraid other than some food there isn't much stuff that either does not come from off-shore or is made from off-shored components.
- chc 6y agoThis viewpoint seems a bit defeatist. It's true that even buying local rarely avoids 100% of interaction with overseas companies, but there's a lot of room between 100% and 0%. If you just don't want to think about it, that's one thing, but if you do care, I don't think letting perfect be the enemy of good is productive.
- FpUser 6y agoI am not defeatist. I am realist / pragmatic and I am looking after myself an my family. It is not in my job description to wage political crusade about China. I buy whatever makes financial sense for me. I am way more concerned about the way FAANG and the likes manage to affect my life. The only reason we have non-local is because of the international trade and your own big corporations moving production and sometimes even research facilities overseas. If you not happy about the non-local situation go to fat cats who sold your country for an extra buck in profits and bought politicians to let them do it and convince them that they're wrong.
- shakezula 6y agoSupply shock is not something we’ve had to deal with for a long time
- jerrysievert 6y agowhich is interesting as there is currently a beer can supply problem. breweries are now ordering more cans than ever, from as many places as possible in order to get their product in the hands of covid-plagued consumers. it's interesting to see cans from a brewery change depending on the week they were canned.
- meristohm 6y agoWhat’ll it take to make can deposits national? I remember a few years back Surly Brewing in Minneapolis, MN, USA was against increasing the deposit because they’d have to pay 8.5 cents for a five-cent deposit. Might we also try what Pacifico did (maybe still does?) with their ballenas—-paying for bottles returned intact, which they then wash and use again? I liked seeing the wear ring around the glass and wondering who else held this bottle.
- vidarh 6y agoNorway used to do this, and had a return rate well over 90% (largely due to people being able to return bottles pretty much anywhere that sold bottled drinks). The bottles have mostly switched to plastic. Return rates are still as high. The distributors argued the recycling of the plastic was better because a not insubstantial proportion of glass bottles ended up damaged enough to have to be melted down and recycled anyway and the energy input to recycle glass bottles is apparently substantially higher, combined with the labour cost to inspect each bottle.
- tastyfreeze 6y agoI am willing to pay for the cost of glass bottles if they are recycled. Having to melt down a bottle to form it again is an ideal recycling situation. The customer returned glass that is already sorted and likely the same type of glass. Aluminum is another great recycleable material. Both glass and aluminum are eroded rather quickly in marine environments. Back to whence they came. Plastic just floats around a very long time.
- 6y ago
- teawrecks 6y agoSounds like a bubble. What should we expect when it bursts?
- hnick 6y ago> So the naive retailer will say "OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order 4 months supply ... and so it goes - an infinite bug methodology. Sounds like how around here our naive consumers bought a few hundred rolls of toilet paper.
- taneq 6y agoThe stupidest thing about that whole phenomenon was that after the first person panic-bought a heaped trolley full, what everyone else was worried about wasn't a genuine shortage but was just other peoples' panic buying.
- scambier 6y agoBut was that stupid, though? In the end there was a very real shortage, so if you were reasonable enough to avoid panic buying, you were risking not having enough toilet paper for yourself.
- bluefirebrand 6y agoThere was a shortage because enough people were buying enough to last them years that it impacted the supply.
- chc 6y agoStrange, that's not what I've read. Obviously some people were doing that, but all the articles I saw suggested that there just wasn't a lot of excess capacity in the toilet paper industry, so even just a lot of people buying 1.5x the normal amount was enough to DOS the toilet paper supply. Have you seen evidence to suggest that people buying years' worth of supply was the dominant factor?
- _pythonlover_ 6y agoOff-topic. If anyone wants to play the beer game, https://beergame.opexanalytics.com https://beergame.opexanalytics.com PS: Made by the company I work for
- taneq 6y agoI wanted to play it but not enough to throw myself into an acquisition tunnel for it. :/ I mean, I understand why the signup form is there, I still don't want to do it.
- bowmessage 6y agoIs it immoral that I typically fill out these forms with false information?
- matkoniecz 6y agoNo, and it is dumb to provide real info unless really needed for some reason. Maybe it could be argued that providing real info is unethical if you know about entire situation, and by providing fake info you protect a bit people who naively shared real info.
- cudder 6y ago`[object Object]` is my favorite thing to fill out these forms with. I'm hopeful it's made at least a few devs go "Ah what the hell is broken now?"
- radiator 6y agoThis is hilarious!
- taneq 6y agoAh, you're a friend of Mr null, I see. ;)
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
- hnzix 6y agoWould you say The Beer Game is a signal for or against central planning? Or is it neutral?
- jfoutz 6y agoI think it’s an encouragement to be like apple. Understand your suppliers and their suppliers and on and on.
- matkoniecz 6y agoIt demonstrates one problem that could be eliminated by central planning, but hard to say that it is argument for it. Equivalent problems of central planning are even worse.
- KirillPanov 6y ago> "OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order 4 months supply ... an infinite bug methodology. This is why unlimited central bank money is so dangerous. Without it the infinite escalation can't get very far before the retailers run out of spare cash/credit.
- refenestrator 6y agoThere's no physical limit on credit, either.
- KirillPanov 6y agoCredit is how central banks print money.
- Steve44 6y ago> seen their shipping from China to Europe quintuple It's actually gone up about ten fold since the beginning of 2020. For a long time a 40ft container from China to the UK was in the region of $1,500-$2,000. By about November 2020 that had increased to around $7,000 and then in January quotes were coming through of up to $16,000. I think it's been fairly stable in the $15,000 region for a few months now. The last I heard this is expected to continue for several months.
- MomoXenosaga 6y agoDecoupling is a meme. Although to be fair unlike the US there is literally nobody in Europe who even wants manufacturing jobs back.
- jfengel 6y agoInteresting. Here in the US, those were regarded as stable, well-paying jobs for people without a college degree. They were seen as a middle-class income that could support a family and a house, accessible to just about anybody (at a time when college was relatively rare). They weren't fun jobs, but seen as good solid labor for sound pay. There are a whole lot of problems with those rose-colored glasses (including that it owed a lot to unions, which are often despised in the US), but I'm curious why Europeans don't even want the rose-colored-glasses version. Are they seen as unpleasant jobs? Or unstable?
- runarberg 6y agoOh, is this the same mechanism that caused toilet paper to run out and remain out for over a month in American cities at the start of the pandemic?