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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I actually take the opposite view - that in spite of how big of a fuckup this is, and how much of an impact it has on global trade/shipping, the end impact to us will probably end up being relatively small.

Probably. Impacts wont be apparently for a while I guess.

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But that's the point, isn't it? In the general sense, one stuck container ship in the world shouldn't have any impact on "us," except for the people whose "stuff" is on it.

That sounds a bit too self-centered a viewpoint in that it is far too narrow and ignoring that there are knock on effects to everything in a general sense that while they fade into the ambient still have an impact. You may not notice say a banana blight in Ecuador and might ask "whatever what does that even mean to me"? Then you wonder why bananas went up fifty cents a piece.

Well, it's not just one stuck ship. A major shipping route is now blocked, impacting many other ships.

I made a similar observation in april 2020. everyone was saying that covid was exposing the inherent fragility of JIT shipping or even the entire system of capitalism. in reality, the worst that happened was toilet paper was out of stock for a few weeks and I had to settle for my second-favorite shape of pasta a couple times.

Things clearly weren't that bad where you were. I had to settle for my 5th favourite pasta shape on a couple of occasions!

(true story, but to be taken in jest)

If you were into board games, you'd probably have felt it. Just about every board game release and reprint has had (and are still having) significant delays thanks to the pandemic.

I think in terms of "how fragile the world is", board games don't really rank, respecfully. Minor inconvenience, but we carry on.

This is the point though, having plenty of slack in the economy (board games, theme parks, etc) means that we would have to fall a long way before people started feeling hungry.

The number of homeless people I see in the streets has visibility doubled, but I'm sure the marginal availability of board games is a sign they aren't feeling any hungrier than usual.

Folks are also hording these for secondary market resell. Margins are good and a resellers can easily eat half the stock or more for secondary markets.

Well, I have been trying to find zero-drop trail shoes for almost a year now. The shops just don't have my size anymore. Shop owners tell me the logistic chain has been pretty impacted indeed.

Nothing vital of course, still.

The secondary market for shoes sweeps up all stock and resells. It’s gotten insanely competitive and bots are one-upping other bots for speed. If you want a desirable shoe just go ebay or stockx. You can’t compete as a manual buyer

there are some very specific items I am still having trouble finding. close substitutes are available, but I'm willing to wait for the exact thing I want. looks like the picture of graceful degradation to me.

Weeks? Around here, it was tough to find on the shelf for, like, 6 months, and I started to question my sanity.

It also affected PSU availability, and auto chip availability.

The weakness of capitalism doesn't need to be exposed, it needs to be acknowledged. And since it's a system that is very profitable for a lot of very powerful people, it's going to take more than a simple pandemic for the status quo to change.

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