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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> All it took was a sneeze and the whole thing falls apart.

But it didn’t fall apart. I’ve been able to get nearly everything I was getting before the pandemic. Prices of some stuff has increases and there are a few things that are harder to find, but the variety of goods available to me now is still way better than it was even just 20 years ago.

The system is stunningly resilient. Shortages of a few things doesn’t mean “the whole thing falls apart”. You’ll know if that happens because people will get really violent really fast when food or water stops.

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Depends how you define "fall apart". Will society collapse? No, most likely not. But that doesn't mean people don't feel significant consequences compared to what they were used to.

Just as a little example, all my remaining orders on Amazon are delayed by months and it is impossible to get any info except what the original projected delivery date was. One product ordered last October has not arrived yet. As a consequence I basically stopped any online orders except a few via ebay and am now just waiting for the backlog to be processed. The complete lack of communication from Amazon does not help, neither does Amazon's slow transformation into a dropshipping AliExpress reseller, causing delivery times to behave as predictably as quantum states.

That’s interesting. My Amazon shipments have been fine for months (though there was some delay and unpredictability at the beginning of the crisis). What sorts of things do you typically order?

Are you outside of a major metro area? I say this because I've had 0 issues with Amazon deliveries during all of this and the only thing I can think of is I live in a major population center. That said it really sucks if that's the case because I imagine Amazon etc are lifelines for people outside of larger living areas.

Yes, I'm not exactly living in Manhattan. That said I've never had such issues before, including during the pandemic - after all I started using Amazon for good reasons, though those advantages have been declining for a while now. Only around Christmas time the delivery times increased sharply and never went back to normal levels as they usually do.

For a few parts I just can't get in a shop I tried other platforms and that made a difference. They often have a hard time competing with shipping fees, but that is a tradeoff I'll gladly take.

> all my remaining orders on Amazon are delayed by months and it is impossible to get any info except what the original projected delivery date was

It sounds like you're ordering items with long delivery times that indicate they're shipping direct from China, is that correct? I exclude any non-Prime items and haven't had any shipping issues in the past year aside from a day delay here or there.

Some anecdata: located in SF. I rarely order non-Prime items. But I did recently order a desk grommet mounted USB hub (not charger) that was only available from China. Originally predicted to take a month, it took slightly longer at five weeks.

I stopped shipping to the US because in some months we lost more packages than arrived.

Something did break the last year i guess, that wasnt normal anywhere

> But it didn’t fall apart.

Barely. I mean... just look at what is going on in the Suez Canal, which is at the moment blocked by a mega freighter which had crashed into the walls and run aground: millions of dollars of damage and delays risking cascade effects in the harbors. Or how car factories all over the world are having issues because TSMC can't keep up with chip demands (and the car manufacturers having slashed orders during 'rona).

What makes it worse is that there are a number of conflicts that could escalate into open wars: the whole situation with China's aggressive imperialism (not just Taiwan), the powder keg Iran/Turkey/Syria/Israel, many countries in South America slowly or openly collapsing... at least some of these can drag the entire world's economy with them, one way or the other.

What's interesting is that most people seem to expect that carrier to be on it's way within a day or two at best, my personal estimate is that this could take weeks to get resolved, if they decide to unload on the spot it might even take longer. This is not easy to fix at all.

Essentially they have one more shot at a quick fix: todays high tide. And if that doesn't do the trick they will have to come up with another solution but those will likely be much slower to put into effect, 224,000 tons (!) is a lot of mass to try to move, especially when stuck.

Car factories may be in trouble, but consumers are not. There si plenty of new and old cars. Maybe not exactly the car you want, with your color of leather and level of trim.

Conflict was here long before globalisation, it has nothing to do with just in time delivery and smoothly running supply chain. Taiwan is a problem, because of chips. The world economy is stronger than some south american country. The "western world" is pretty much ok until someone decides to bomb us. Europe will switch from eating rice to more bread, and everybody is satiated. And the rest wasnt doing any better 50 years ago than is doing now. Except for obvious war zones, which pains me very much that in this age of abundance we have to deal with shitty psycho leaders and tribal mentality warriors.

Covid had nothing to do with the suez blocking, could easily have happened in 2019, and it's a very rare event

The Suez is being progressively widened and doubled. Previous blockages have been due to war, this type of blocking I think is the first since 1869. The powder keg of Israel is hardly new (indeed that's often been the cause of previous Suez blocking), collapsing south american countries isnt new either - Pinnochet? Peron?

The chip shortage is completely normal supply and demand at work. Real markets are not magic faucets that supply an unlimited amount of things at a constant price.

We haven’t even hit government mandated rations for things and that was a matter of course several times throughout the 1900s.

The Suez Canal is a cost and time optimizer. There is an alternate path around South Africa that all of these mega ships are more than capable doing. Transport costs for some stuff and delays will go up, but that’s it. That won’t even impact people in the US in any meaningful way.

> You’ll know if that happens because people will get really violent really fast when food or water stops.

I don't think this is true anymore.

What do you mean? Are you suggesting that somehow modern people have lost the drive to violently compete for resources if they became critically scarce? That seems unlikely to me. I think the old phrase "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy" is as true now as ever.

I had never heard that phrase. Very insightful.

Reminds me of

" Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people... will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes. "

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/861326

DS9 had a lot of commentary. When someone asks why a democracy has such inequality, I think of Rom:

"You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters"

I don't know about grandparent but I do think that we have become soft and accepting of circumstances our ancestors would not tolerate. How many people live pretty sad lives distracting themselves with toys, electronics, crappy content, and self-medicating with marijuana or even opiates.

There are even biological signs of this shift. Like dropping testosterone levels in men.

> How many people live pretty sad lives distracting themselves with toys, electronics, crappy content, and self-medicating with marijuana or even opiates.

And how many people lived pretty sad lives being nothing more than serfs or farmers, without even the comfort of a distraction?

Software engineer and a farmer here. distractions are overrated. i ditched mine and my life improved greatly. ive since learned that building and making things is much more fun than crappy electronics toys content or drugs. Passive entertainment is for the lazy and those that lack creativity. Try picking up a hobby like woodwork or blacksmithing. Having sampled all of those listed distractions extensively, i can say im qualified to make the assertion.

And that's for you, not everybody is made of the same cloth, some might live for the distractions.

There's a huge gulf between "making things is a fun hobby" and "if I don't make things, I may not be able to eat / have shelter / clothe myself".

“Rich person who farms for fun instead of to barely feed a family suggests farming is fun. News at 10.”

Lots of people throughout history lived their lives under other people's boots without fetching a stick and poking their oppressors eyes out

The vast majority even.

Ive got a warm shower, a warm meal, dental, a roof over my head. Out ancestors would kill for the privilege of not having their children die from dysentery, Thier parents dying because your unrefrigerated food spoiled.

Enjoy a short brutal life with all that extra testosterone.

Not exactly sure that's how it works. I don't think there's any established correlation between low testosterone levels in males and comfortable lifestyles in society. I hope not, but it's possible the inverse maybe true. High testosterone drives males to compete for status, the by-product of which in human society is much of the complexity we see around us. Nobody really knows what happens to society when testosterone plummets - your warm meals and the roof over your head could be casualties of that.

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