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Comment by malwarebytess | Hacker News Reader

A fear I had about winding down industry, shipping, and services for COVID-19 was that getting it all up and running harmoniously would be unmanageable. The incredible interconnectedness of all industry would cause problems. Say one node wants to start again, but it depends on 5 other input nodes that also want to start again. Those 5 cannot begin without their own connected nodes. And so like an apocalyptic version of trying to restart a global power grid you would have cascades of failures, rubber-banding demand and supply, and so on.

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Logistical black start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

And here I am worrying about how to bootstrap programming language implementations. "What would happen if maven central suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth?" seems positively quaint.

Well that's a fascinating page.

The trade-off between "might need" and "will need" is fascinating to think of (and pay for).

Just getting a petroleum cracking plant restarted takes days and careful orchestration by an experienced Engineer. How much more complicated is our global shipping network! It seems that everybody randomly turning the dials they can reach is not a good system.

The invisible hand will provide.

Say our economic theories, God willing.

Inefficiency brings up business opportunity. Some industry can’t realign quickly? Make a bet that a new business will be nimble enough to deliver faster and take their market share.

Yay, that's exactly the thinking that got us into this mess - trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the supply chain has spread every step of production far and wide (I already mentioned the global journey a pair of jeans is going on before being sold for next-to-nothing in a mall near you: http://competendo.net/en/A_Pair_of_Jeans) - which was possible until now because of cheap logistics, but the current situation reveals how fragile this really is. Maybe what we need is not more efficiency, but more common sense...

> trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the supply chain has spread every step of production far and wide

efficiency did that? not price?

why would American companies have moved manufacturing overseas if it were cheaper at home?

Nothing efficient about catching fish in alaska, sending them to china for canning, and then shipping them back to a california grocery store.

if expensive shipping becomes the norm, I would then expect local manufacturing to boom.

I watched the dismantling of the textile industry during the 00’s. The companies were bought with leverage. The mill equipment packed up and shipped to China. The mill buildings torn apart for recycled heavy timber and brick and the land offered for redevelopment.

It had nothing to do with the costs of running a textile mill. Nothing to do with economic competition. There was simply an opportunity to make money by selling off the assets. It was about the financial industry not manufacturing.

i have a theory that this is a result of the civil war. the north was run by bankers and lawyers, the south was farmers.

The domination of the north led to domination of services/finance over labor.

Had the south broken off, they would have preserved a labor centric economy.

Even back to the founding fathers, you have Adams (Mass., Lawyer) and Hamilton (NY, Banker) from the north and in the south you had Washington (Virginia, Career Military Leader), Jefferson (Virginia, Farmer), etc...

I think the commenter is more referring to just-in-time supply chain management where companies run on much thinner buffers of time and physical stock.

> efficiency did that? not price?

You're looking at the wrong resources if you don't think lowest cost is analogous to most efficient. Time, labor, etc. all take a back seat to the bottom line when retail goods are in play.

Economically price and efficiency are supposed to be the same thing. It's very expensive to have Westerners do things.

So we need some people to either be unemployed or paid dirt for the system to work? And you question why the world is moving towards communism and not against it?

Not what he said.

Imagine for a moment we’re talking about combustion engines rather than people. A turbocharged V8 is more powerful than a 2-stroke chainsaw engine.

Which one do you use if you’re building a go-cart which will never exceed 15 mph — the small light cheap one, or the massive heavy expensive gas-guzzler?

Even this analogy doesn’t necessitate the poor stay poor: which engine do you start with when you want to learn how engines work?

Yes. Even in economics class, analogies galore.

We bunch people into convinient terms like labour because it's easier to work with.

Till this day we have no idea how to model "labour" since people are niether cattle nor logs of wood. Nothing about their actions suggests linearity or regularity.

Lets take offshore employees. Early days it was fun. The employees offshore were cheap and not prone to complain. Yippeee. Now we find out that no, these people are earning nothing, they have to send money home and live in apartments barely bigger than a US family bathroom. Their idea of boss isn't a senior with loads of experience - boss is someone who cracks the whip and lays threats to their livelihood daily. The quality of work plummets and big corps have to hire onshore at exhorbitant consultant fees to fix the mess, which may never really get fixed because why would a consulting firm want to lose a client for being too good?

This is a really horrible analogy, which says that all people in developed countries are inherently better than those in developing countries.

No. Rather “better” isn’t a useful word in cases like this — that’s why the go-cart analogy. You should not even want to use a V8 in a go-cart even with an unlimited budget.

Many consumers will buy from a more efficient supply chain because the price to them (for goods in stock) is a few percent lower. They don’t have nearly as powerful incentive to overpay for years in hopes of having more stable supply after a pandemic-induced global disruption event (especially since there’s no guarantee that those excess costs would actually deliver the stability; they might just be paid as wages, profits, additional advertising, and/or business expansion).

But there’s always some potential mess and fragility regardless of your model... robustness comes from the ability to react to failure i.e. to take advantage of an opportunity like this shipping crunch.

What we need is to not have events that disrupt our supply chains.

An industry like shipping doesn’t seem a likely target for disruption. It would take a massive investment to make even the smallest dent in the problem, and it’s mostly an analog system.

Then manufacture locally and sell what can’t get a place on a ship.

The lack of shipping capacity creates business opportunities and not just for building ships or ports.

Imagine Amazon couldn't restock items and it hit their top line significantly.

I guess but that upstart better be willing to bet a massive amount of capital on creating that infrastructure only to potentially see its advantage evaporate as the supply lines normalize.

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