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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Previous recessions were a lack of demand. What happens when it’s a lack of supply?

We can’t go back to the way things were if the global supply chain is damaged or completely stopped. And that’s not even considering local businesses that may never come back after this is over.

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I think this one is more about demand than supply. White-collar workers are of course being productive from home, but even manual work - in an employer-controlled environment - could conceivably be made safe. Amazon just announced that they plan to hire 100k warehouse and delivery workers.

Public spaces on the other hand (retail, restaurants/bars, travel destinations), are just totally infeasible to make safe until things are fully over with. That's a serious cut to demand that just has to be waited-out.

How is there a lack of supply and not of demand right now? Most of China is already back to work, and we'll see lack of demand in the coming weeks/months when people isolate themselves and not going out buying things.

It's both - but the supply side could take up to a year to fix. I work a small company but our lead times have tripled.

if we hadn't centralized on China, as the global sole manufacturer the supply issue with covid wouldn't have been too drastic. in nature everything has redundancy points e.g you've to 2 arms so if you lose one, you can keep functioning to a good extent. big companies ie monopolies n the likes of Github as central failure points should be taken out completely. we need multiple suppliers, operators to provide redundancy.

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