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Comment by johncalvinyoung | Hacker News Reader

This situation is a mess for anyone waiting on something that's sitting in a container in Shanghai, or on a ship in the queue in Long Beach. A friend's business has a critical LCL shipment that was supposed to arrive to their supplier (likely receiving a whole container, but not many containers) last week, but is stuck on a ship somewhere. That's stressing out my friend the logistics manager ahead of an upcoming product launch.

And no telling what the next product in queue is going to take in terms of component sourcing. Yikes.

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Is it just me or does it seems like a lot of things are headed for disaster?

The positive thing is that a lot of capital is floating around ready to be invested in a coming post-covid boom, but at the same time hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide are either already bankrupt or close to - then there's these shipping issues that seem non resolvable in the near term - and worst of all a lot of industries already seem way overvalued, especially the housing markets i many cities.

If the economic bubble bursts, then shipping slows down while thousands and thousands of companies close, and is bought up by megacorps laying off millions to automation and centralisation, while QE and other tools are slowly becoming unfeasible because of the gravity of climate change and a disappearing petrodollar hegemony.

So many confounding factors ending in an inflationary nightmare!

Is this take way too pessimistic?

I also have predicted 25 of the last 3 economic panics, hah.

We’ll see - maybe this kicks off an inflationary spiral? Only time will tell.

Genius comment right here, thanks

Nah you’re pretty on point. It’s depressing really

Is your friend an Evangelion operator?

Haha nope, a small specialist business that's not yet at container-scale in their supply chain orders. Warehousing for a high number of unique SKUs relative to scale is frustrating enough, but this year's supply chain ripples have made him miserable.

I think they were humorously asking what "LCL" means in this context.

"Less than Container Load"

Ah, thank you

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