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Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Used to It
- exabrial 5y agoDang good time to get into bespoke shipping it seems. I don't know much about logistics, but some of the prices seem outrageous to haul containers
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoCan your bespoke ship get into a container port to unload, though?
- fridif 5y agoMeet me a few miles offshore and we can do this Miami Vice style
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoWith containers weighing up to 30 tons? I don't think so. And even if you do... great, now you have it on a different ship. You still have to get it on land, typically onto a truck. So you need some kind of a crane. And those are pretty busy these days...
- dylan604 5y agoMaybe SpaceX can send "Of Course I Still Love You" with a bunch of container trailers to be loaded directly. It could then sail back to port with a fleet of semis waiting to pull away. Totally human free, so no covid delays.
- fridif 5y agoSimply reinvent shipping to not use heavy containers but rather lighter weight parcels. We recently bought a custom couch that was delayed 3 months sitting on a ship. I offered to haul it off the ship myself, which of course the government wouldn't allow.
- cmsj 5y ago"Simply reinvent shipping" ...... good luck with that!
- swader999 5y agoCan anyone find me a c can right now in Italy?
- politician 5y agoBug: If you click Reader Mode fast enough, then you can bypass the paywall.
- bedhead 5y agoCOVID: come for the newfound hatred amongst family and friends, stay for the perpetual commerce dysfunction and dystopian nightmare! Are we having fun yet?! Yay!!!
- PHGamer 5y agocovid is the excuse not the reason. but fun times for those at the top.
- m4rtink 5y agoMaybe each generation needs a crisis ? It was usually wars in the past but its a pandemic now ? Something to tell to the next generations, just instead of dodging bombs its dodging an invisible danger ?
- dylan604 5y agoWhen the youngest generation has not known a period when there was NOT a war, something else needs to happen.
- sk5t 5y agoNot all crises are equal. This current one didn't really bring people together. And although I wasn't around to see it, it's hard to imagine 40% or whatever of the population in 1942 were all, "that guy in Germany isn't even so bad, in fact I don't think he even exists at all, I'm going to hoard aluminum and steel for personal use now."
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoThat was mostly the case in 1939 though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- imtringued 5y agoHolocaust denial is a thing...
- bb123 5y ago
- Sophistifunk 5y agoWe spent 40 years chasing down and eliminating every redundancy, buffer, backup, and alternative in the name of "efficiency" all the while globalising every system we could. Even the slightest hiccup is liable to bring such a fragile system down, and this was not a slight hiccup. And as supplies dwindle throughout the system, demand increases at every interface point, not just the end-users. This machine is not going to come back up as it is. It just can't. We need to start putting those backups and redundancies back in place, which will cost throughput, latency, and (fuckloads of) capital.
- R0b0t1 5y agoSupply tends to be very elastic when demand exists. There are shortages, yes, but for some price I can get almost anything you could ask for. I'm pretty sure part of what we are seeing is price gouging. E.g. for many electrical products I see that the stock has shifted to resellers, you can look on octopart (assuming part is large enough to be tracked). What's hard to evaluate is how real the shipping shortage is. It may be partially people demanding more pay, or it may be entirely a shortage.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoYes, but you must use regulation to require a resilient supply chain, as it’s cheaper not to build it to be resilient. Capital optimizes for capital, people must optimize for people.
- R0b0t1 5y agoWell, no. A lot of businesses would store spare parts save the fact they are taxed quite heavily in some jurisdictions. My experience with lean/JIT in the manufacturing space shows when it is actually done at every level your business starts hemorrhaging money waiting for parts to arrive. Each step of the process unless perfectly foretold adds 1-3 weeks in a good quarter. It is actually the local preference that we keep more spares than we do, but accounting says no. If you read the fine print with how Toyota implemented lean you find out that they made their partners contractually obligated to keep inventory, not themselves. Inventory was still kept but who paid the tax bill and who paid upkeep changed.
- lelandbatey 5y agohttps://archive.is/68csV https://archive.is/68csV
- alexose 5y agoI used to work in supply chain logistics. Boy howdy, I am not surprised by any of this. Most companies (especially the older and more established ones) have zero visibility into their supply chains. Suppliers don't share this information without a lot of arm-twisting. It's very much like being in dependency hell, except that the dependencies themselves are also in dependency hell. Edit: Shoutout to sourcemap.com, who are trying to solve this problem!
- Ericson2314 5y agoThis is also why microservices are bad and libraries are good. Much better to have a copy of the IP than rely on some black box.
- eikenberry 5y agoWhy not both? Better to run the service applications yourself. You have the IP and don't have the tech lock-in of a library.
- Ericson2314 5y agoComposition of microservices is untyped, error-prone and once done has too many failure modes.
- lolinder 5y agoComposition of microservices doesn't have to be untyped, it just almost always is in the current ecosystem. There's always an implicit contract in place between the services, and there's no reason that contract can't be encoded in types on both ends. (I agree in general that microservices aren't all they're cracked up to be, but lack of typing isn't an inherent flaw in the concept.)
- Ericson2314 5y agoYes it could be fixed, but even then I don't think it is worth it. The early language designers too got excited at the thought of generalizing subroutines to be able to suspend and resume rather than return once (especially before the call stack, where activation records are naturally ephemeral), but this was wisely abandoned. Later we see much interest in actor models, and they too are disergonomic, and a skeuomorphism from planning people. What's important is note the nodes, but the dataflow between them: programming is plumbing not connecting increasingly complicated pipe fittings. Most people get this dead wrong, and microservice are just the latest misunderstanding. All it has over the others is the unhealthy synergy with Conway's law.
- jgalt212 5y agoJIT makes much less sense when overnight interest rates are 0%. The cost of carrying too much inventory is negligible.
- toiletaccount 5y agoCovid was just the finger on the trigger for the whole world's loaded footgun. Excessive interdependency and each new generation of the managerial class keeping things lean to look good on paper has landed everything up shit creek. Idle hands were justifying paychecks. I've seen companies go from doing everything in house to outsourcing everything. It was ugly before covid, but now it might be sinking the ship. They used to retain the necessary talent, keep a stock of necessary $THING, and get things done on time and on budget. Now the MBA's see a way to cut costs on paper but it all ends up late and over budget. On to the next ship for them after this top heavy piece of shit sinks. I'm sure there's a careful business calculus for not bringing people up from the bottom but goddamnit I used to see results, and happier coworkers.
- thepangolino 5y agoWhy say Covid and not lockdowns? Like it or not, Covid didn’t prevent the workers from going to work. Government mandates did.
- jgeada 5y agoI’m not going to expose myself to a 1% chance of dying for your profits. None of us owe you a profit.
- meepmorp 5y agoNot just death. If you have severe illness but survive, you're likely to have continued health problems for life. And even if it doesn't hit you, you might bring it home to someone you care about.
- hiddencost 5y agoThe death toll and consequences of widespread long covid (and consequences of much more rapid mutation and the collapse of the medical system) would have caused significantly more economic damage than the lockdowns.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y agoI don't understand why this problem would be self-perpetuating. It seems to me that if the cost to ship items rises, that would incentivize investment in building more containers, deploying more ships (perhaps converting abandoned cruise ships into container ships), paying dockworkers extra overtime, etc. Why doesn't the price system end up correcting all these issues?
- Ericson2314 5y agoBecause we get scared and hit demand with a hammer (cutting off unemployment insurance, etc.), And thus deny ourselves growth to the new equilibrium.
- gajjanag 5y agoYes, it will self-correct eventually. However, one thing that is easily missed is how shipping lines have been operating at a loss/narrow margins for years, e.g., Hanjin bankruptcy: https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-hanjin-shipping-files-for-u-s-bankruptcy-protection-1473002745 https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-koreas-hanjin-shipping-fi.... Many of the major shippers are not interested in building out capacity right now (e.g., Maersk CEO has consistently messaged this: https://splash247.com/if-msc-ends-up-having-more-capacity-than-we-do-thats-not-the-end-of-the-world-skou-talks-up-profitability-over-market-share/ https://splash247.com/if-msc-ends-up-having-more-capacity-th... ). It makes sense: why would they when they know that inevitably shipping rates will fall and they will have excess capacity on their hands. Instead, they are essentially adopting a wait and see approach. In the meantime, shipping customers pay more, the shipping companies strengthen their balance sheets and reward shareholders with fat dividends, and finally demand will settle down naturally. What some fail to realize is that this will take a decent amount of time. In particular, no one expects easing of the shipping situation until 2022: https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/hapag-lloyd/hapag-lloyd-warns-shipping-tightness-through-2022_20210625.html https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/hapag-lloy...
- FooHentai 5y agoReminds me of the US-based mask manufacturer who refused to scale up in the early stages of the pandemic, citing previous times he'd done so only to be left in the lurch when demand dried up. His main point (IIRC) was the strong conflict between the moral imperative and economic incentive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22339349
- ffggvv 5y agothen how will inflation be “transitory”
- 01100011 5y agoI'm pretty sure when Powell says inflation will be transitory, he means that inflation will spike and then subside to normal, positive levels. He's not saying inflation will be higher than desired, but then will drop below the intended target. So yes, prices are not coming back to pre-covid levels, but the current inflation spike should ease next year. Now, I'm not saying I personally believe that, but I see a lot of folks twisting his words and it's getting tiring. Happy to be proven wrong if someone can show me a quote from him where he contradicts my interpretation of his comments.
- hellothere1337 5y agoIf inflation is 5% this year and 2% next year. Does that make the 5% spike transitory? It doesn't seem like it.
- nostrademons 5y agoBy the Fed's definition, yes, that is exactly what they mean by "transitory".
- imtringued 5y agoCentral banks do inflation rate targeting. So for them "inflation" is the speed of inflation. Why do we not have price level targeting aka perfect price stability? (targeting the CPI index to always be at 100) Because we don't have negative interest rates. A slow down in the rate of inflation is considered disinflation.
- OJFord 5y agoYes, because it goes (made up numbers) from 2% to 5% and the back to 2%; it was only momentarily 5%, it was transitory, and it passed. If you're driving through some country roads at 60mph you might have a transitory period where you pass through a 30mph section by some little hamlet; when you resume 60mph you're behind schedule (if you planned not expecting the 30mph section) sure, but you're still moving at 60mph again.
- rawoke083600 5y agoI know it has been discussed somewhat in the past...but I still struggle to get "contact lens solution" in my country(South Africa), which is basically "sterile saline". One of those things you thought you will never have a problem of getting.
- BenoitP 5y agohttps://archive.fo/68csV https://archive.fo/68csV
- bump64 5y agoI am struggling to find what an average person with a bit of excess money that goes into saving can do when we are faced with higher than normal inflation. I was a kid when hyperinflation happened to my country in Eastern Europe and it was devastating for my family. Hopefully something like this won't happen, but then what should we do if in the next few years we are hit with inflation at the ranges of 10% to 15%? Maybe I should just accept that it is out my control and focus on my work and personal development so I can find a job in any market condition.
- jmnicolas 5y agoGold, farmland what else?
- kilroy123 5y agoFarmland is for the rich not an average tech worker with disposable money.
- greenie_beans 5y agoNot necessarily! Pretty sure you don’t have to be accredited for this: https://www.acretrader.com/ https://www.acretrader.com/ (edit: yikes nvm that’s false for now, but they say they plan to open the platform to non-accredited investors) And similary, you can provide capital to small farmers: https://gosteward.com/ https://gosteward.com/
- Dumblydorr 5y agoThe traditional advice is to buy assets, like investments, real estate, valuables, objects, things that require money to buy but hold their own value over time. I don't think we'll reach hyperinflation, there are supply chain issues that will be solved over time here. I do think that education and healthcare have been inflating for years, there's definitely some shadow-inflation that hasn't been measured fully.
- abraxas 5y agosame situation. My grandparents sold their farm in 1988 with a very nice house (for the era) and a year or two later, by the time they wanted to buy a flat in the city with that money it was barely enough for a used car. Hyperinflation is a catastrophe.
- karlkloss 5y agoI always knew that all this "just in time" and "lean" stuff would somedays come back and bite us. It's great as long as it works, but it also has the potential to blow up a small crisis to epic proportions.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shreyshnaccount 5y agothe current state of the system is a product of late stage capitalism, and making everything so globalized. even when it doesn't need to be.
- varjag 5y agoWe've experienced systemic supply chain disruptions (mainly commodity electronic components) as early as 2016/2017, and they never really recovered. It's not just COVID or automotive or any other single factor, although it have gotten worse across the board. Now you can have problems sourcing thermoplastic resins or even certain sizes of self-tapping screws. The global order is slowly unraveling.