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Comment by core-questions | Hacker News Reader

This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term, and may also result in moving some manufacturing jobs back to the US. As the standard of living rises in China, labour costs will increase until eventually the only way it will really be cheaper to do things over there is because of either better logistics, or lax environmental/labour laws that enable shortcuts we can't/won't take here. The latter is something we could reasonably tariff or tax (considering how popular the idea of a carbon tax is amongst progressive folks, this shouldn't be too hard of a sell).

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This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term...

Well, this is the problem, right. Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis, otherwise it's a net cost. So if you're outcompeted by the other non-resilient companies before that crisis happens, it doesn't help.

I feel like societal resiliency needs to be rewarded (in many contexts, utilities are obvious but also food supply, etc) but I don't know what a good way of doing this would be, except making it government run and making resiliency a primary objective. I don't see how a for-profit system that rewards short-term gains could ever be made to value resiliency.

This is part of the thinking behind tarriffs - make that resiliency more competitive.

taxes and tariffs are there to shape the market, not to make entrepreneurs poorer.

Iunno, taxes seem to encourage being born into wealth, and otherwise punish working the most severely.

And if you have to spend most of your income on stuff, you too proportionately pay more sales tax than someone with excess to invest.

The fix to this is to increase your income.

Ensuring that all companies account for and pay their true costs would take some of the 'efficiency' gains away from larger players. In the current system larger players are better able to bend laws to their favor.

> Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis

resiliency mostly pays off when there's a crisis. You can reduce latency in systems by sourcing things closer to use, but having a fallback farther away.

It's a tradeoff though. If I have two suppliers, the odds that I have 'a supplier issue' are doubled. But the odds that I have no supply at all is lower.

Two suppliers are more resilient so, you always have a fall back. Suppliers run into trouble all the time, single sources screw you in that case. Cluster risks are always bad.

You can also play the suppliers off each other. My dad's employer did a lot of data processing. They had two computer vendors they liked to keep near a 50-50 split when they weren't punishing one of them for some perceived slight.

I learned much later that the only way to get IBM and some other big vendors to do anything at all for you is to move your checkbook. That is, if the checkbook might be coming out of your pocket, they're interested. If you threaten to put it away, they are very interested. The rest of the time? Fuck you, we have other checkbooks to worry about.

Unfortunately you can't just spin supplies up as if they are in AWS EC2 zone. It takes years to built if they weren't already there. The more apprioriate comparison would be to have a home-hosted server cluster in addition to EC2 cluster which most companies simply don't do. It's just too expensive.

Sure, if companies start thinking about their supplier base just now, well that's just too late. I can only comment on physical supply chains, so. But even there building up suppliers takes time and money. Personally, I would love to see the risk of single sources be valued higher in the equations. One can dream, right?

Edit: Now I got the cluster thing. I meant cluster in the sense of risk, meaning you have a single point of failure and high degree of risk concentration. But your point is really interesting, I never thought about these aspects of cloud computing.

A local supplier is not necessarily faster, even with shipping from overseas factored in.

Rsillience can not be the primary objective of capitalism. It's not possible. Ironically, socialism is based on the idea of being most resiliant. Think hard why China turned that ship to a different direction.

Mexico wages are already lower than wages in China. In fact, chinalawblog.com talks a lot about companies shifting to Mexico due to USMCA and short turnaround for supply chain.

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/international-manufactu...

HP did exactly this

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