8 ms·

Hm, seems like a monocausal 'explanation' of a complex problem - or let's say a mere opinion with little background information. Given the 'hundred year crisis

by cmenge 5y ago

Hm, seems like a monocausal 'explanation' of a complex problem - or let's say a mere opinion with little background information. Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... So, yes, some problems may exist but I think we have witnessed a surprisingly resilient system, given how optimized everything is and how unprecedented the issue is. I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. Keeping tons of spare capacity is neither economical nor environmentally friendly. Also, it would probably only shift the problem elsewhere.

CamperBob2 5y ago
I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view. There's no reason to think this is over yet. We might just be getting started.
- cmenge 5y ago
  Agreed, good point. I should have said "we have been faring relatively well [so far]"
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Just you wait until China pulls a Crimea on Taiwan. There go our semiconductors, this time for real.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Well at least we will be going back to writing everything in C and squeezing everything out of our old legacy chips because what else can we do? Maybe the Intel/IBM/Globalfoundries fabs in the US can continue producing whatever last gen chips they are capable of.
- jollybean 5y ago
  There's no reason to think that we are 'just getting started'. We know what the system looked like before, and post-pandemic, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't return to that state. Aside from some ongoing pandemic measures, by and large, we should see things mostly settle into the system that already works. It's just going to take some time to clear. In the meantime, most things are working well enough. Much of the inflation we are seeing is a function of 12 years of mass money printing and pandemic response, if it were not for that, the pricing issue wouldn't be so acute. If there is a 'new normal' it will due to monetary issues - the adjustments in supply chains I think will be incremental, with a few strategic changes i.e. TSMC in Austin etc..
ben_w 5y ago
If it was just one item, such as graphics cards, I wouldn’t be particularly concerned. The problem is it’s a bit of everything, a mere 11-ish years after the Great Recession, which was itself “supposed” to be a once-a-century economic catastrophe.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  To be fair, once a century refers to average, it is by no means a guarantee that it will be a century before the next crisis.
  - kqr 5y ago
    To be even more fair, there's absolutely no reason to think these types of events are independent; there's good reason to believe they're positively correlated. This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened. (But if you're lucky and it doesn't happen again the chances decrease further, giving you an average of 100 years between them again.)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      I can believe a pandemic might cause a global economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or the Great Recession, but I my imagination isn’t giving me any ideas how the latter might cause the former?
      - tuatoru 5y ago
        ... poverty causes a rise in consumption of bush meat, like bats in Wuhan[1] or primates in central Africa[2]? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
      - breser 5y ago
        By the economic catastrophe causing us to elect a president who dismantled a group that worked to monitor and respond to global health issues to prevent them from becoming a pandemic. I think it's hard to say if that group could have prevented Covid-19. Nor am I necessarily saying that the economic crises of 2008 caused us to elect Trump. But I think you could possibly find a path from one one to the other.
mfer 5y ago
> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply chain driven. > how unprecedented the issue is. How unprecedented is it? In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries. So, if something changes there (like the mask issues we had early in the pandemic) we have limitations here. And then there is the changes in posture of China where many of our things are manufactured. It wouldn't be unheard of, historically speaking, for that to impact businesses in the future.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. I count 13 global pandemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology
  - gruez 5y ago
    what's your methodology? The linked section includes stuff like the "2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic", which was "worldwide" but had a death toll of 53 people. Should that be considered a pandemic? If we go with the "Epidemics and pandemics with at least 1 million deaths" table, there's only 6 worldwide pandemics.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      If you're counting pandemics since 1891, I think any number between 6 and 13 is more defensible than the number 2. Let me count again, while leaving out relatively minor pandemics like Zika: * Fifth cholera pandemic * Third plague pandemic (multiple outbreaks are listed) * Sixth cholera pandemic * 1915 encephalitis lethargica pandemic * Spanish flu * 1957-58 "Asian flu" * Seventh cholera pandemic * 1968-70 "Hong Kong flu" * 1977 Russian flu * HIV/AIDS pandemic * 2009-10 swine flu * COVID-19 That's 12 and doesn't count stuff like Zika, SARS, or MERS. It also doesn't count any of the Ebola epidemics. I don't know if cases or deaths are a good proxy for expected supply chain impact. SARS, for instance, had relatively few cases and deaths because it mostly broke out in well-functioning developed East Asian countries that were capable of responding to it effectively, but those same countries have outsized effects on global supply chains.
Consultant32452 5y ago
In wealthy countries like the US it might be harder to get that new XBox you wanted. In the rest of the world there's hundreds of millions of people who are starving to death. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-million-people-worldwide-marching-toward-starvation https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-mi...
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  This is from 18 months ago saying covid "could mean" "up to 260 million" face a food crisis. I'm very confident the real numbers of starved people since then is vastly lower.
- dzonga 5y ago
  as someone originally from a 3rd world country. I can truly say never trust what the UN or any of those big NGO's say. It's propaganda pushing a narrative. what causes starvation in most poorer parts of the world are western induced climate change i.e draughts, floods etc. Then of course political instability
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Indeed, rural people in less-developed countries are hardly connected to global trade at all.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Keeping tons of spare capacity is neither economical nor environmentally friendly. Also, it would probably only shift the problem elsewhere. * There some things that are people simply need for survival. At a certain point, having no spare capacity and cascading failures means people die. Lack of masks last arguably killed people last year. * It's quite possible to excess capacity and be good to the environment while present production is often terrible despite the lack of excess capacity. * Sure, a complete lack of excess capacity is economical. Which is the OP's point in different words. Robustness to failure has been traded for immediate returns.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  > Lack of masks last arguably killed people last year I think that was the least of the problem. At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, hospitals, nursing homes, and many other companies would not allow their workers to bring in their own PPE. This continued for upwards of six months. Several outbreaks occurred in my area because management refused to allow their workers to use PPE. Fast food operators also had several outbreaks because they were not testing their employees temperatures until it was far too late. As late as April, we had dental offices across the country refusing to allow receptionists to wear masks. Same went for supermarkets and restaurants. Upwards of 30% of lives could have been saved if corporate and management hadn’t setup major roadblocks for worker protections. One of the most common arguments I heard was, “we don’t want the customer to see our people behind a mask”. For companies, this wasn’t a pandemic with real health risks, this was a front-facing visibility problem for the organization. These people should all lose their jobs for the suffering they caused.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprepared and there's every reason to think the same factors that created this virus will create others much sooner than a hundred years from now.
- greendesk 5y ago
  I have a tidbit on the following: >> we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. But just a tidbit on this statement.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it. That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be. And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. That's a fine rule of thumb but not something to literally bet your life on. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of the continent (This [1] claims 90%, which might be much but it was a lot). [1] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html

by cmenge 5y ago

CamperBob2 5y ago

I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view. There's no reason to think this is over yet. We might just be getting started.

cmenge 5y ago
Agreed, good point. I should have said "we have been faring relatively well [so far]"
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Just you wait until China pulls a Crimea on Taiwan. There go our semiconductors, this time for real.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Well at least we will be going back to writing everything in C and squeezing everything out of our old legacy chips because what else can we do? Maybe the Intel/IBM/Globalfoundries fabs in the US can continue producing whatever last gen chips they are capable of.
jollybean 5y ago
There's no reason to think that we are 'just getting started'. We know what the system looked like before, and post-pandemic, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't return to that state. Aside from some ongoing pandemic measures, by and large, we should see things mostly settle into the system that already works. It's just going to take some time to clear. In the meantime, most things are working well enough. Much of the inflation we are seeing is a function of 12 years of mass money printing and pandemic response, if it were not for that, the pricing issue wouldn't be so acute. If there is a 'new normal' it will due to monetary issues - the adjustments in supply chains I think will be incremental, with a few strategic changes i.e. TSMC in Austin etc..

ben_w 5y ago

If it was just one item, such as graphics cards, I wouldn’t be particularly concerned. The problem is it’s a bit of everything, a mere 11-ish years after the Great Recession, which was itself “supposed” to be a once-a-century economic catastrophe.

rootusrootus 5y ago
To be fair, once a century refers to average, it is by no means a guarantee that it will be a century before the next crisis.
- kqr 5y ago
  To be even more fair, there's absolutely no reason to think these types of events are independent; there's good reason to believe they're positively correlated. This means once one happens the chances of it happening again soon are greater than before it happened. (But if you're lucky and it doesn't happen again the chances decrease further, giving you an average of 100 years between them again.)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I can believe a pandemic might cause a global economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or the Great Recession, but I my imagination isn’t giving me any ideas how the latter might cause the former?
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      ... poverty causes a rise in consumption of bush meat, like bats in Wuhan[1] or primates in central Africa[2]? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
    - breser 5y ago
      By the economic catastrophe causing us to elect a president who dismantled a group that worked to monitor and respond to global health issues to prevent them from becoming a pandemic. I think it's hard to say if that group could have prevented Covid-19. Nor am I necessarily saying that the economic crises of 2008 caused us to elect Trump. But I think you could possibly find a path from one one to the other.

mfer 5y ago

> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply chain driven. > how unprecedented the issue is. How unprecedented is it? In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries. So, if something changes there (like the mask issues we had early in the pandemic) we have limitations here. And then there is the changes in posture of China where many of our things are manufactured. It wouldn't be unheard of, historically speaking, for that to impact businesses in the future.

philwelch 5y ago
> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics. I count 13 global pandemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology
- gruez 5y ago
  what's your methodology? The linked section includes stuff like the "2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic", which was "worldwide" but had a death toll of 53 people. Should that be considered a pandemic? If we go with the "Epidemics and pandemics with at least 1 million deaths" table, there's only 6 worldwide pandemics.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    If you're counting pandemics since 1891, I think any number between 6 and 13 is more defensible than the number 2. Let me count again, while leaving out relatively minor pandemics like Zika: * Fifth cholera pandemic * Third plague pandemic (multiple outbreaks are listed) * Sixth cholera pandemic * 1915 encephalitis lethargica pandemic * Spanish flu * 1957-58 "Asian flu" * Seventh cholera pandemic * 1968-70 "Hong Kong flu" * 1977 Russian flu * HIV/AIDS pandemic * 2009-10 swine flu * COVID-19 That's 12 and doesn't count stuff like Zika, SARS, or MERS. It also doesn't count any of the Ebola epidemics. I don't know if cases or deaths are a good proxy for expected supply chain impact. SARS, for instance, had relatively few cases and deaths because it mostly broke out in well-functioning developed East Asian countries that were capable of responding to it effectively, but those same countries have outsized effects on global supply chains.

Consultant32452 5y ago

In wealthy countries like the US it might be harder to get that new XBox you wanted. In the rest of the world there's hundreds of millions of people who are starving to death. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-million-people-worldwide-marching-toward-starvation https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-mi...

BurningFrog 5y ago
This is from 18 months ago saying covid "could mean" "up to 260 million" face a food crisis. I'm very confident the real numbers of starved people since then is vastly lower.
dzonga 5y ago
as someone originally from a 3rd world country. I can truly say never trust what the UN or any of those big NGO's say. It's propaganda pushing a narrative. what causes starvation in most poorer parts of the world are western induced climate change i.e draughts, floods etc. Then of course political instability
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Indeed, rural people in less-developed countries are hardly connected to global trade at all.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Keeping tons of spare capacity is neither economical nor environmentally friendly. Also, it would probably only shift the problem elsewhere. * There some things that are people simply need for survival. At a certain point, having no spare capacity and cascading failures means people die. Lack of masks last arguably killed people last year. * It's quite possible to excess capacity and be good to the environment while present production is often terrible despite the lack of excess capacity. * Sure, a complete lack of excess capacity is economical. Which is the OP's point in different words. Robustness to failure has been traded for immediate returns.

sammalloy 5y ago
> Lack of masks last arguably killed people last year I think that was the least of the problem. At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, hospitals, nursing homes, and many other companies would not allow their workers to bring in their own PPE. This continued for upwards of six months. Several outbreaks occurred in my area because management refused to allow their workers to use PPE. Fast food operators also had several outbreaks because they were not testing their employees temperatures until it was far too late. As late as April, we had dental offices across the country refusing to allow receptionists to wear masks. Same went for supermarkets and restaurants. Upwards of 30% of lives could have been saved if corporate and management hadn’t setup major roadblocks for worker protections. One of the most common arguments I heard was, “we don’t want the customer to see our people behind a mask”. For companies, this wasn’t a pandemic with real health risks, this was a front-facing visibility problem for the organization. These people should all lose their jobs for the suffering they caused.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Given the 'hundred year crisis', I think we have fared relatively well from a purely economic point of view... Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprepared and there's every reason to think the same factors that created this virus will create others much sooner than a hundred years from now.

greendesk 5y ago
I have a tidbit on the following: >> we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. For Sars 1 to spread widely, it has to be less deadly. There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. But just a tidbit on this statement.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  There are limits to how a virus can both be deadly and contagious. That leaves out the whole question of incubation time. The scary thing about COVID is that it gives you several days to a week or more to walk around spreading the infection before you even know you have it. That's why the reaction in the public health sector was so dramatic. It was the sort of thing that could have easily been much worse than it has turned out to be. And it's still only one or two mutations away from living up to the worst-case fears: a seriously-deadly virus that spreads all over the world before anyone knows what's happening. One that large sectors of the population have already been preconditioned to deprecate or ignore.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Viruses conform to the distribution of deadliness-vs-reproduction rate. That's a fine rule of thumb but not something to literally bet your life on. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it wiped out a substantial percentage of the population of the continent (This [1] claims 90%, which might be much but it was a lot). [1] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html