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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

There is plenty of transport, and plenty of diesel fuel. Thus my city doesn't need to be self sufficient. I'd expect my beds to be exported to other nearby cities, while they work on making ventilator parts.

I'm not sure if it is needed though: there is probably more than enough lumber in the local lumber yards currently intended for local construction projects but when nobody is building/remodeling...

Actually I live in a manufacturing city so I'd expect we would be making ventilator parts, since I don't have machining experience I'd be repurposed to packing the parts into boxes. Any city has enough tablesaws to build beds, not every city has as many people who know how to run a lathe as mine.

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There is implied failure of services in Spookies response. Already here in vegas, my step dad works at a bread factory as supervisor, they are seeing an increase of demand. He's had to go in several times late at night to relieve someone who was on a longer shift. He says if they lose one person they will start falling behind.

The short term consumables or raw resources are the ones that matter the most. If people stop going to work to make bread or toilet paper or refine oil it's going to put a strain on a lot of things. The oil and chemical industries are really going to be important for producing medical items like gloves, sanitizer, cleaning agents, plastic ventilators, sanitary plastic containers for equipment and needles, etc. Not to mention the effects of lower oil production and the strain and cost on shipping those things back and forth to their respective factories.

But it will have to be pretty bad before we have to worry about that I think.

A lot of that can be attributed to the bullwhip effect. It is the effect that even small demand fluctuations down stream, e.g. consumers, in a supply chain can have on parties, and availability, up stream, e.g. manufacturers, suppliers, whole sellers and so on.

One of the reasons why panic, and the resulting changes in consumer demand for certain products, is so dangerous. Not because stores are running out of toilet paper, but because of the mid term effects this has on availability of all kinds of things. This effect is impossible to predict upfront.

So, yet another reason to stay calm and avoid this kind of stress on supply chains providing goods of daily need.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

JIT inventory systems run everything from materials to people on razor thin margins with little elasticity against failures.

This is, in my opinion, a common misconception about modern day supply chains. JIT is mostly used for the last delivery step, component deliveries for automotive final assembly lines are the best example for this. And even there is a certain buffer, a well planned and monitored one.

All other steps involve buffer stocks and inventories. This inventory is sitting local warehouses for example. Or just dead weight in the various locations. More often than not, this is due to inefficiencies.

That beingsaid, JIT is simply to hard to implement to use it for anything else then the most important parts. and even there only for the very last step, everything else smply has to many variables for JIT to work.

The best example are automotive supply chains that kept running all the time through February.

And stuff like groceries are not run JIT, with the exception of the replenishment of shelves and local stores from a regional warehouse. And that is not true JIT.

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