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Comment by jedrek | Hacker News Reader

The winter holidays are, generally speaking, an amazing example of how hard it is to scale for massive, sudden, short upticks in the real (not virtual) world. You see it everywhere in the : services losing jobs because they don't have the manpower to service a surge in orders, customers skipping stores because they can't find parking or don't want to wait in line, packages not getting delivered on time, inventory being sold out.

You even see it much closer to home. We're having Christmas dinner at our house this year, a total of 11 people - almost 4x more than normal. We don't have the cutlery, plates, chairs, etc for that many people. Do we buy it? Do we borrow it? Do we rent it? A small thing, but it shows you how even one night can be very demanding.

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Whether it is around your dinner table or in the back of a UPS truck, Christmas is essentially a DoS attack.

Merry Christmas, by the way - I just noticed it is after midnight local time, and December 24th!

And you are presumably in continental Europe, where Christmas is celebrated on the 24th! Of course in the USA, it’s celebrated on the 25th.

One of those things that severely confuses people that aren’t aware of it.

That I am - well, on the outskirts of it, in what Pliny the elder referred to as Ultima Thule. (Pliny was an amateur - there's still plenty of land to the north; perhaps that counts as Ultima non plus ultra Thule or something?)

Anyway, adding to the confusion are the Russian orthodox church - they celebrate Christmas January 7th, as they haven't gotten around to adopting the Gregorian calendar just yet.

I didn't know that! Merry Christmas!

Probably the most efficient is to ask your guests to bring some extra things?

Depends. Will your guests remember to bring them? (among other concerns)

For cutlery and dishes, one probably wants extras anyway to buffer for those days when they couldn't yet wash the previous day's dishes because they were too busy. We've all experienced it. Probably don't need guests to bring cutlery and dishes. But chairs? Probably no need to have personal buffer for chairs ever. And I'm not sure asking guests to bring their own chairs is the answer when guests come. Does everyone need to go buy folding chairs to be a houseguest now? How do hosts guarantee that the chairs would not damage specific carpets or hardware floors? Etc.

Last year I lent a couple of chairs to my neighbour, since I was going away for Christmas, and he had extra guests.

That's very interesting. It makes me wonder if there are any good free market ways of promoting the over-building of crucial infrastructural services

There's one. Depending on who you ask, it's called surge pricing or price gouging.

I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency of things like storage space and production equipment. In an industry like shipping that goes doubly so because their main assets are sorting facilities and vehicles. If the plants/fleets are 10x as big as they need to be for 99% of the year it’s probably economically better to just deal with the crunch for that last 1% of the year rather than own too much infrastructure.

Depending on how extreme you want to take the concept of "free market," offer incentives to groups of people to celebrate meaningful cultural holidays on different days. Pay the Greek Orthodox to switch back to the Julian calendar for Christmas (so they'd celebrate on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar), market Kwanzaa like crazy, rebrand the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6) as Santa Claus Day and make a cultural norm of gift-giving then instead of on Christmas, etc.

Honestly, even though I care a lot about attending church services for Christmas, I have never really cared about visiting family and friends on Christmas specifically - it's just logistically complicated and expensive and falls at a stressful time of the year. If you gave me a way to go fly to visit my family on some cheaper day and have it count for the same cultural expectation, I would very enthusiastically take it.

Employees might actually prefer one week of unbounded craziness with a clear end over a whole procession holiday weeks. And with free market doing its thing, in the end you would just see postage ever so slightly cheaper.

"Over-building" here looks like US sprawl in new development areas of the past few decades: huge parking minimums, huge number of road lanes, and all that other stuff that makes this sort of thing not a problem, but is just inefficient waste 99% of the time.

The free market way that the costs (assuming they're significant) would be properly reflected in prices and cause some of the people to shift their purchasing/deliveries/whatever to another time.

Currently, there's no meaningful economic pressure to do your christmas shopping months in advance; so that's probably an indicator that the infrastructure is manageable and no major changes are really needed.

There is a negative incentive as well. Most return policies are thirty days, so if you shop months early you have no recourse should a gift be found to be defective at Christmas.

We have plenty of dishes, utensils, cups and so on. (Particularly coffee cups - one of the things I collect.) Sometimes it's good to be a hoarder. :)

It's hard to be a hoarder living in a 500sq ft flat.

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