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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

It's not "lost", it's a hedging tradeoff.

Willfully ignorant of. I remember when JIT was seen as this revelation due to UPS and other shippers stream lining their processes. So this window opened up and folks were like, "we can collapse our supply chains to UPS/Fedex" ...

yeah.

This is directly analogous to the buffer bloat problem. Smaller inventories and more responsive suppliers means better communication of intent and supply in the supply chain and therefore greater efficiency and prices. Why are advocates of big redundant inventories willfully ignorant of this?

If we optimize for efficiency, we get supply disruptions every 5 years or so. If we optimize for redundancy, we suffer from higher prices all the time, and delayed availability of all new tech. I don’t know which is worse.

Depends on the item. If it's medical supplies or food, "supply disruptions" can kill people. If it's iPhones or Christmas novelties, it's not a crisis.

Folks keep inventories because the cost of not having X at time Y is not priced accordingly at the supplier. Digikey doesn't care or know if the 0.10$ part is going in a 10M one-off or a 4$ toy.

JIT works for fungible commodities, you suddenly realize how much the cost/volume/downside ratio works when your always-on JIT capacity goes to zero.

I don't want my water treatment plant to go down because a bean counter decided that spare parts are now stocked entirely by McMaster-Carr.

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