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Ram Shortage, SSD shortage, CPU shortage, GPU shortage, diesel shortage, now motor oil shortage....... Are we going to have shortage of everything now ......

readthenotes1 13d ago
And the promise is that we will have a shortage of shortages!
walt_grata 13d ago
Dont forget beef
LeBit 13d ago
I realize the shortages you enumerated have different reasons , but a highly respectable French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici , has been repeating for years that we are heading into an inevitable age of "degrowth". It is not an "if". It is now inevitable. He is very pro alternative sources of energy but he clearly explains nothing can replace petroleum right now. Petroleum is used to build everything. Gas for your car. Your clothes. Plastic bags. Our beloved computers. Everything uses petroleum one way or another. We are doomed. I’m just happy I’m too old to go through all the bad times that are coming.
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- icantevenhold 13d ago
  You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable. Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it. Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.
  - toasty228 13d ago
    > You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything. Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
    - danaris 13d ago
      > Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Not at this scale and price and convenience. We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
      - toasty228 12d ago
        You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems. If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
    - bawolff 12d ago
      Scale tends to be a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon. on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.
- stinkbeetle 12d ago
  > nothing can replace petroleum right now. You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses. It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century. > We are doomed. More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers. A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic. Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".
  - anon7725 12d ago
    > Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn. > We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint. I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
    - 11d ago
- belorn 12d ago
  2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.
- Timon3 12d ago
  We should have accepted that our trajectory is not sustainable, and voluntarily replaced and reduced consumption over decades. But growth was more important - "because the others won't stop growing either!", or "because we're only x% of global emissions", or similar arguments. Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.
vkou 13d ago
Well, we already had the toilet paper shortage last time around, but round #2 of this administration just keeps on giving.
ozim 13d ago
If you check what is globally going on then yes, it looks like we are heading that direction.
toasty228 13d ago
We're an energy civilization entirely built around fossil fuels, mostly petrol, on top of that we "optimized" everything to the max, which means any little inconvenience will now break several systems/sub systems. We're about to realize what it means to have a globalized economy addicted to petrol
- axus 13d ago
  COVID was the last time our global CO2 output decreased, hope it sticks this time.
icantevenhold 13d ago
Yes but it’s fine we have way too much of everything anyway
dgellow 13d ago
Yes, pretty much. Have you seen that the houthis took the bab al-Mandab strait? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/11/world/middleeast/houthis-yemen-red-sea-shipping-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/11/world/middlee... Food production is also at risk
CrimsonCape 12d ago
We should have been hiking rates all year to drive a spike in AI hyperinflation, but now that the AI hyperinflation is going to cause real inflation, it will be too late. Some people think its a brilliant idea to strangle rates until they are nothing, ignoring the impacts.

readthenotes1 13d ago

And the promise is that we will have a shortage of shortages!

walt_grata 13d ago

Dont forget beef

LeBit 13d ago

I realize the shortages you enumerated have different reasons , but a highly respectable French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici , has been repeating for years that we are heading into an inevitable age of "degrowth". It is not an "if". It is now inevitable. He is very pro alternative sources of energy but he clearly explains nothing can replace petroleum right now. Petroleum is used to build everything. Gas for your car. Your clothes. Plastic bags. Our beloved computers. Everything uses petroleum one way or another. We are doomed. I’m just happy I’m too old to go through all the bad times that are coming.

deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
icantevenhold 13d ago
You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable. Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it. Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.
- toasty228 13d ago
  > You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything. Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
  - danaris 13d ago
    > Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Not at this scale and price and convenience. We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
    - toasty228 12d ago
      You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems. If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
  - bawolff 12d ago
    Scale tends to be a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon. on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.
stinkbeetle 12d ago
> nothing can replace petroleum right now. You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses. It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century. > We are doomed. More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers. A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic. Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".
- anon7725 12d ago
  > Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn. > We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint. I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
  - 11d ago
belorn 12d ago
2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.
Timon3 12d ago
We should have accepted that our trajectory is not sustainable, and voluntarily replaced and reduced consumption over decades. But growth was more important - "because the others won't stop growing either!", or "because we're only x% of global emissions", or similar arguments. Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.

vkou 13d ago

Well, we already had the toilet paper shortage last time around, but round #2 of this administration just keeps on giving.

ozim 13d ago

If you check what is globally going on then yes, it looks like we are heading that direction.

toasty228 13d ago

We're an energy civilization entirely built around fossil fuels, mostly petrol, on top of that we "optimized" everything to the max, which means any little inconvenience will now break several systems/sub systems. We're about to realize what it means to have a globalized economy addicted to petrol

axus 13d ago
COVID was the last time our global CO2 output decreased, hope it sticks this time.

icantevenhold 13d ago

Yes but it’s fine we have way too much of everything anyway

dgellow 13d ago

Yes, pretty much. Have you seen that the houthis took the bab al-Mandab strait? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/11/world/middleeast/houthis-yemen-red-sea-shipping-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/11/world/middlee... Food production is also at risk

CrimsonCape 12d ago

We should have been hiking rates all year to drive a spike in AI hyperinflation, but now that the AI hyperinflation is going to cause real inflation, it will be too late. Some people think its a brilliant idea to strangle rates until they are nothing, ignoring the impacts.