It feels like America is running out of everything | Hacker News Reader

It feels like America is running out of everything

theatlantic.com

164 pointsajay-b312 comments

This is an issue with latency, not throughput. Our supply chain is actually running at considerably higher throughput than we ever have before. The ports provide numbers for activity on their websites - Long Beach and Oakland are both operating at 30% higher capacity than they were pre-pandemic.

What has changed is the queues and the pricing. The shortages we are feeling are the gaps that have surfaced between when retailers trigger reorders and when they are replenished. They grew accustomed to being able to do that just-in-time as forecasted inventory went to 0, but the added delays have made this much harder.

Additionally, the shipping prices have made many things simply uneconomic to ship. I saw an analysis on the difference in cost recently for a grill: prior to the pandemic, shipping from China to LA contributed $5 to its price, with shipping costs up 8x, that's now $40. Rather than fulfill orders at negative margins, many people are simply waiting for lower prices after the holidays. It's not that they're being held up in transit, these things aren't being shipped to begin with.

An interesting take. During the just in time days, were the goods accumulated somewhere ready to satisfy orders or were they all in transit?

I'm sure it varies somewhat from company to company, but the general ethos was to reduce warehousing to an absolute minimum. From a corporate finance perspective, this has a bunch of benefits. Excess inventory is effectively unproductive capital. Additionally, it's costly to store and is subject to theft and damage as well. A lot of the focus on JIT came out of post-war Japan where capital was scarce and this was done out of necessity.

In some cases, an incredibly aggressive supply chain and payment schedule can actually create financing for a company. Aswath Damodaran's corporate finance class mentions one of the major alkaline battery producers as an example. At any point, they only have 2 days worth of production in inventory, and they require payment within ~7 days from clients, while their own suppliers are paid after 30 days. That means at any point, they are holding about 20 days of revenue worth of cash without paying any interest.

Walmart focuses on fast inventory turnover in their stores. They get paid by customers at point of sale, but pay suppliers months later. During that interval they can invest the float and earn interest. So to a limited extent they literally can lose money on every sale but make it up in volume.

Holy cow. That saying of "make it up in volume" finally makes sense in so many places it previously seemed infeasible.

Its not purely cashIn-cashOut, there is a time property as well, and various forms of investment can make cash_t1>cash_t0

Yep. Some companies plan this way from the start, but almost all do it once they get mature enough where these type of financial engineering optimizations can really make sense to spend time and expertise on.

I have read that something like 5% of Starbucks' accounting liabilities are gift cards that have not yet been redeemed. So again in a simplified financial view, that is a loan at 0% interest, and some percentage of that "loan" will never get called in.

I guarantee you they have models about what percent and at what rate over time that "loan" actually gets "called in" (redeemed for coffee and store employees' time).

Of course, it costs money to create these cards, build out the tech stack behind them, deal with fraud monitoring, etc. I am sure many millions were spent on this and continues to be spent on it, yet the gift card is free. You don't need to pay an extra penny to use the card. That's paid for by people who don't redeem all the value on the cards as well as the spread between payment and redemption, so someone must have run the numbers and decided whether building this infrastructure is worth it.

It's probably paid for by the better fee structure on payment processing: credit card processing is generally a base fee + a percent of the purchase. By having people put $20 on a Starbucks card once rather than making 5 different $4 transactions, they reduce the fixed charge they incur by 80%.

That's another good point, I didn't think of that cost reduction.

Wal-Mart most certainly does not lose money on every sale. Its gross margins have been very stable at around 24-25% every quarter for the past 10 years, including the pandemic. The interest it makes on the float, while significant to you or I, is mostly a rounding error in the interest-rate environment we're currently in.

https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/gross_profit_margin

Anecdote.

I have a few supermarket chains within reasonable shopping distance. The higher end one seems to be low in stock of a few staple items.

The more mid-tier grocer has no shortages that I saw.

My guess is they warehouse things differently.

> prior to the pandemic, shipping from China to LA

Perhaps it’s time for the US to finally stop doing that.

interesting how one innocent looking property can affect a system

news report of 10 days for tankers to unload cargo in california too

That latency also reduces throughout. While a freighter is anchored waiting to unload it's not carrying other cargo. We have the same number of ships, but the effective number of ships has been slashed.

It's a good observation, but it only impacts throughput when ship capacity becomes the limiting factor. If you added more ships right now (or shortened wait times), it wouldn't change throughput.

Do people allocate emergency space on sea pods to free ships ?

What's a sea pod?

some term I made up to describe temporary floating ground area (polders ?)

There are barges which could hold some cargo temporarily. But there's no practical way to move most cargo from a freighter to a barge without the type of large cranes found in ports. There are only a few floating cranes in the world large enough to even try.

More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not. Major news outlets claimed that 'new economics' would mean that the expected inflation and shortages would not come to pass. Instead of critically questioning government official's proclamations of a new economics, outlets gladly parroted this position. This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.

I don't remember anyone talking about "new economics", I remember people speculating inflation was due to supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic, and that would be short lived.

I still disagree with that theory, clearly giving everyone more money is going to raise prices, but it's not quite as ridiculous as you make it sound.

>"I don't remember anyone talking about "new economics""

Lots of people have been talking about how modern monetary theory (MMT) means that the USA can 'print money' (increase the money supply) without fear of inflation.

That's just a strawman. MMT just means that the government runs its own bank and will never run out of money. Regarding inflation, with MMT you can buy anything that the economy can produce, that's it.

> that's it.

That can't possible be it. There must be some consequence to increasing the supply of money. I don't admit to knowing what that consequence is but there is no way the story is, "we make more money. the end"

I understand MMT is the increase in money supply is accompanied by an increase in taxation and by taking the money back out of the economy slows inflation.

I think the caveat is that politicians can supply money into the economy (increase their chances of re-election), but will be reluctant to raise taxes in an effective way (to not decrease their chances of reelection).

Unless the government burns or locks away the money it taxes - in which case all effects of MMT are muted - it is going to just lead to inflation from government expenditures. There is no way to escape the price impact of increasing the money supply, as prices are always set by supply and demand.

MMT does not say that you can't cause inflation by increasing money supply.

It does say that the government that controls the currency (monetary sovereignty) never has to default.

I think people may be mixing up the increasing popularity of MMT with the idea that we have been "pumping money into the economy" for years without the official measures of inflation ticking up much, at least until very recently.

I don't think the average person buying cars, trying to rent/buy housing, or send their kids to college would agree with the official narrative of low inflation however.

> There must be some consequence to increasing the supply of money.

MMT holds to the orthodox monetary view that inflation/deflation result from expansion/contraction of money supply relative to output. MMT, despite its name, is quite orthodox in monetary theory.

Where it is (somewhat, though most orthodox voices I think would concede this point if cornered and unable to talk around the question) unorthodox in description is in theory of government finance, as it holds that fiscal constraints are a fiction (for a government operating in its own fiat), and that the only real constraints on government spending and its relation to taxes are not fiscal limitations of a finite purse but the monetary effects of money creation by spending and money destruction by extraction via taxes, etc.

But the real conflict between MMT practitioners and orthodox economics doesn't even seem to be on the empirical, descriptive elements of economic theory, but prescriptive/normative elements of policy recommendations made by adherents to the theory.

yes, the consequence is; those who are more easily able to accumulate the money, will still hoard and stash all the excess.

MMT is one of those persuasions that can only exist in America, same as Libertarianism on the other political end.

In any non-American 'monetary sovereign' country, printing too much money will crash the exchange rates (this is not merely a consequence of inflation - some of the processes involved are independent). It's a slightly different casual mechanism than the neoclassical one, but still the result is a de facto government default.

The USA however holds the world's reserve currency, and the normal restraints indeed don't apply anywhere as much. This however does not mean there are no restraints. Fortunately the country has never gone full MMT, so we'll never find out empirically.

What are the side effects when you "buy anything that the economy can produce"?

Mind elaborating on who "lots of people" are?

Yes, I've read many articles on MMT and about the supposed ability to print interminably and never cause inflation. That is what I was referring to by 'new economics'. I've read a few articles that even admit such a thing has never occurred before but this time it's different (TM).

If people believe in it, it will happen, economics is whatever the people want it to be.

Somehow that doesn't square with the realities of resource extraction and manufacturing.

Most of modern development doesn't square with the realities of resource extraction and manufacturing long term either.

It just had a lucky run with discovering hundreds of millions of years of stored fossil fuels to propel its development.

What in the article makes you think that the shortages are not transitory? Maybe the shortage period will be longer than originally expected, but that doesn't mean they were wrong.

And WTF is this "new economics" bit? I never heard anything about that, either from government or non-fringe media sources. Links, please.

Of course they’re transitory give a loose enough definition of transitory.

Most of the supply chain experts are predicting that it will be years before this is unwound. Years.

> And WTF is this "new economics" bit?

It's talked about quite often and it's most significantly the idea that government doesn't have to worry about spending money it doesn't have. The formal form is usually called Modern Monetary Theory.

And which government departments or beaurocrats have adopted it?

> need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory

Because announcing there will be shortages is guaranteed to produce shortages.

I used to buy a sum total of six rolls of TP in 2019 (I use a bidet, so this is mainly for guests).

Right now I have a box of 24 in the house with two used all through 2020 + 2021 (no guests, that's why).

So that's 22+ rolls which I have taken off the market without utility, which is because the week I went looking for TP it wasn't there and you could order in bulk instead.

They pulled the lever on the trolley problem, therefore it is their fault, but not pulling is also a choice with damage.

Random aside - how do you dry off after using the bidet?

Some have heaters that blow dry air.

You use toilet paper, you'll just need way way less of it.

You can also use washable towels to pat dry.

I usually sequence it into the shower after that in my schedule (this is what I did in India growing up).

My partner uses the air-dryer that is in the bidet (~2018 Brondell Swash), but there's a bit of that feels very unhygienic to me & I'd rather just soap up right after.

Companies are in love with JIT, so they don't warehouse many products. When disruptions in the supply chain happen it's then up to the customers to do their warehousing for them.

There's a tax on inventory in warehouses. The government wants JIT too

Most states don't tax inventory.

https://taxfoundation.org/state-business-inventory-tax-2021/

Cool, never knew this having only worked in Texas. Both "phone maker" and "online retailer" had year-end efforts to reduce warehouse value before we took inventory. For retail it kind of works out okayish because it coincides with the holiday season, but for less elastic demand it puts an extra burden. I remember things like shifting inventory to a customer to have it returned after inventory.

> I remember things like shifting inventory to a customer to have it returned after inventory.

This seems like something that would have been obvious to outlaw when drafting the legislation for the tax.

> They pulled the lever on the trolley problem, therefore it is their fault, but not pulling is also a choice with damage.

Ruining institutional trust by patronizing and lying seems like much worse long-term damage than toughing out a TP shortage.

Announcing "There will not be shortages" is equivalent to announcing "There will be shortages". The choice is more whether to call attention to the issue or not.

I don't think that misleading people for their own good is the news media's job. Some government officials may believe that it is theirs in certain situations, but I'm of the opinion that transparency is almost always the best policy in the long run.

Populism is a political ideology which pits working class and low income common folks against the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful.

The people who own these news networks are literally the people that populists position themselves against.

The campaigns against populists (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders) are usually successful. In the case of Trump, they weren’t. I think what we are seeing now, where the news has basically just given up and semblance of even trying to be an indicator of true things which are happening in the world, is that elites are trying to course correct.

Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).

So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.

Edit: when you guys downvote this can you please just give at least some kind of explanation? I really wish some of you could have seen the level of hope that the poor and working class had for the first time in a LONG time, and what this lying and gaslighting has done to them. It’s horrible.

I think you could prove this by following the money. I suspect that none of the major news organizations make the majority of their cash flows from advertising. I would suspect that they are operated at huge losses or increasing debt funded by their ‘shadow customers’. My cursory search was unable to produce any transparent financials. Maybe somebody else can do better.

That seems extremely unlikely. They’re funded by advertisers.

Okay then why are they all going broke and being bought by huge conglomerates?

Operating at a loss is the same thing as being funded by someone else.

The big problem is media is greatly funded by clicks, which leads to picking a demographic and pandering to it.

Hence AT&T owning CNN & then coming up with the idea for a network like OAN to cater to a different demographic.

> Populism is a political ideology which pits working class and low income common folks against the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful.

No it's not. It's a system whereby the powerful tell working class and low income common folk to be angry at things like immigrants, minorities, other countries, etc. so their anger goes elsewhere. A more modern alternate form involves convincing people to be angry at things that don't exist, like Satanic pedophiles harvesting adrenochrome or 5G chips in vaccines, so people expend their limited energy fighting windmills and diving down rabbit holes that lead nowhere.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you are angry at someone about a condition such as high costs or unemployment, ask yourself if the people you are angry at have the power to act as decision makers in control of any of the decisions that led to that condition. If the answer is "no" you are angry at the wrong people.

That's not populism because it involves thinking, and populism is mindless.

Last I checked, populists don't care about anyone's race. They care about the rich and powerful aiding and abetting illegal immigration, because that increases labor supply and lowers the wage floor.

Hmm, but the news channels owned by the ultra wealthy, who get their advertising revenue from the ultra wealthy, and who are staffed by the ultra wealthy, all told me that those poor people who are upset about illegal immigration are a bunch of racists who are too stupid to understand labor economics.

> Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).

You responded to me, but I 100% agree with you!

I remember in Marin county, my gym had hired a guy with down syndrome because they didn't have enough employees -- unemployment was so low. My local safeway had resorted to hiring extremely disabled people to help with checkout. There was at least one paralyzed lady doing checkout and a guy without hands as well. For those individuals, such an opportunity would be very difficult to come by (I know ADA exists.. but let's be honest).

> So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.

Absolutely. If we saw sustained real wage growth the way we were beginning to see with Trump, people wouldn't have to rely on debt to finance their lives, which would mean a reduction of asset opportunities for the upper class. They couldn't stand that.

Not just mainstream media - the most upvoted comments on HN were those "debunking" inflation by claiming it was transitory, baseline etc

> This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.

You almost answer your own question, but mistake cause & effect.

They weren't reporting critically, it just happened that their preferred (leftwing) political option was out of power. They were lying against Trump / for Democrats, just like they're now lying for Biden. The only difference is, who's in power.

I agree with you... that's why I said that my friend. I understand completely that they were lying against Trump. I'm trying to get others to see that. They cover for the democrats (fiery but mostly peaceful protests... lol, what are people smoking these days)...

Agree, this mob or any kind of collective mentality and thinking they are speaking for everyone when they are not and actually have a nihilist agenda is tiring.

>More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not.

Because that's what they do. They define reality.

When it comes time to convince people that the shortages and inflation are normal and will always be there (and were always there in a "we've always been at war with Eurasia") way, they'll do just that.

>This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.

2016-2020 didn't have critical reporting either. It had hysterical partisan crap, with a big bias against Trump with ridiculous stories proped up to inifinity because it made good bucks (and because Trump was championed by middle/working class/flyover state people - basically everything esteemed and hip journalists, academics, and pundits on the upper middle class - or aspiring to be there - despise).

The same partisan bias proped up Biden (a long-time lame "professional politician", forever an insignificant mediocrity, and now barely functional due to age, that was touted as some kind of political messiah by the media).

>parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory

Are you claiming these shortages are permanent? I see no evidence of that, since already things which were scarce or costly have returned (wood, toilet paper, etc.).

It's still more likely these shortages will subside as workers return (a decent amount of the shortages are Delta shutting down production lines).

Nothing is permanent. I am claiming they will be with us for a long while. Transitory means like a few weeks or months. Not close to a year.

Things that were short but are not now, a few months after they became short:

PPE, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, lumber, cleaning supplies, canned goods, $100 bills, jigsaw puzzles, baking yeast, Nintendo Switch, pool chlorine, condoms.....

And a lot of these things were never actually short - just that panicking people hoarded them.

Another set were caused by lower COVID demand meant manufacturers didn't place traditional orders, and now that demand is back, they're sitting in lines getting orders filled.

All of these things and more faced shortages, yet bounced back.

Okay. Here are more important things that were short then, and are still short:

1. Computer chips, and things that depend on them like cars 2. Labor 3. Groceries (have you seen the stores?)

You are talking about trivial items, like baking yeast and jigsaw puzzles, and I'm talking about far-reaching systemic issues, like labor and food.

Labor is people choosing not to work, because they have better options. That is a plus for people, right? As aid turns off or slows down, I'd expect them to return to work. That shortage is not long term (it has not been short even a year) and is not systemic.

If you're claiming food shortages are systemic, then you're using the word wrong. There is no fundamental breakdown in food that will last forever. Delta is shutting down some factories and lines. And there is not a food shortage - there are temporary shortages on some items, and those items rotate in and out. I don't think I've seen a good there yet that is simply gone for months and months.

Yes, I have been to the grocery store. The vast majority of food items are still there. When something I want is not on a shelf, I ask, and they say it comes in a few days, so I go back and get it.

Ripples on rotating products, when the vast majority are still available, is not what I'd call a "food shortage," unless I simply wanted to be hyperbolic.

From how many angles do you want to check your claim?

More evidence? If there were large scale shortages, companies selling food should lose noticeable revenue, and you can check their stock prices and revenue statements, and you'll find they are increasing, not decreasing.

Chips also are only short for very few categories - I order stuff from Digikey and Mouse nearly every week, and have only hit one chip that not in stock, but it's also a new chip (ESP32-S3). And today, lo and behold, I got some from Digikey. It's the first time I have seen them for sale anywhere.

So there's evidence for you that even new chips are popping up.

Consumer electronics use about half the world chip supply. Go to a Best Buy and see how many consumer electronic products are still there, and how many are not. Very, very few items are missing. Things that are out are things that were new as COVID hit - new Xbox, PS5, some GPUs (although I have bought 3 3090s during the "chip shortage"), Switches were short (bought 2 - the handheld and TV versions). But not much else I have looked for requiring chips have been short.

Cars use about 3000-4000 chips, and any one missing stops a car. I guess that's what make you think there is a much bigger chip shortage overall.

There's a tiny few chips that are short. And it's not systemic.

So, care to estimate what percentage of chips are not available? What percentage of groceries are not available? It is demonstrable that the labor force participation went from ~63% before COVID, to 60.2% at the lowest in COVID, back up to 61.7% [1]. That sure doesn't seem like there a massive labor drop. I'd guess it climbs back up once Delta is more under control.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Let me "parrot" other commenters and say that I've never even heard of this "new economics" you're talking about, and I check mainstream news pretty regularly, so I'm not sure what you are talking about.

Also, let's be fair, most of the "critical reporting" under Trump was not "The administration forecasts x% economic growth, but experts disagree" variety, it was more like "Wait, did the president just tell people to drink bleach, or was it supposed to be a joke, in which case which part was a joke and which wasn't?" variety.

> Also, let's be fair, most of the "critical reporting" under Trump was not "The administration forecasts x% economic growth, but experts disagree" variety, it was more like "Wait, did the president just tell people to drink bleach, or was it supposed to be a joke, in which case which part was a joke and which wasn't?" variety.

Nonsense. Certainly, the outrageous statement you mentioned was critiqued, but relatively mundane ones were too, such as the president's prediction of vaccines before the end of 2020 (correct), the president's desire for low interest rates, the president's desire for tariffs, the president's desire to end wars, etc.

Many many articles were written directly critiquing boring parts of Trump's economic policies.

Here's a 'fact check' from the New York Times when Trump announced he wanted lower interest rates:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/economy/trump-in...

For example, here is Trump's statement:

> Because of the faulty thought process we have going for us at the Federal Reserve, we pay much higher interest rates than countries that are no match for us economically. In other words, our interest costs are much higher than other countries, when they should be lower. Correct!

There is only one 'fact' mentioned here, which is that our interest rates are higher than other countries. The times admits this is true. It says:

> It is true that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates nine times since 2015, leaving the federal funds rate, its main policy tool, at 2.25 to 2.5 percent. That is, indeed, far higher than rates in advanced economies, including the eurozone and Japan, where some policy rates remain in negative territory.

It then goes on to 'fact check' the opinion based parts, and instead of disputing fact, it excuses the feds actions.

Can you find me a NYT 'fact check' for the Biden's administrations claims the inflation is transitory? Of course not, because for a democratic president, the NYT extends the privilege of not fact checking one's opinions

Theory: most of the Facebook Hate in the media right now is largely due to it being one of the main critical outlets against said media and those who align with its preferred point of view. It is the everyman’s antidote against them.

If the dominant viewpoint on FB was the opposite viewpoint a la every other social media outlet, we most likely wouldn’t be having these discussions about FB right now, or at least not anywhere near this degree.

Well, in many cases they were transitory. You may remember, for example, big stories about a lumber shortage from earlier in the year, until the shortage spontaneously resolved itself in July.

It spontaneously resolved as people chose to not do projects.

Feel free to lay out the entire supply chain and the numbers that support your hypothesis.

Why is it that only those making my argument must go into great detail, but those pretending you can print endlessly with no inflation do not?

You don’t have to write a dissertation about it, but if your response to prices going down after they went up is to speculate about why the downswing might be fake, I think you have to seriously consider whether your position is falsifiable. Is there any evidence that, if found, would convince you the lumber shortage was in fact transitory?

"...were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not."

If this was obviously the case then why didn't you make a ridiculous amount of money speculating in the stock market or other markets?

I did?

> More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not.

Because the inflation being referred to being transitory was from the central bank's monetary policy, but the inflation we're seeing for many things is from supply-side constraints. The why of a thing happening can be just as important, if not more so, than the what happened.

People were expecting demand-pull inflation ("too much" economic activity), but we we're probably seeing is the cost-push variety:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view

See for example Shipping being >4 times higher than the base line of January 2019:

* https://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook#GDP-growth-projections...

The same thing can have multiple causes, some of which many be more easily predicted and/or modelled.

Also, this begs the question for what is considered "transitory": 3 months? 6? 12? Other?

The fact of the matter was that inflation was expected because of the spending surge, but that 'transitory' meant that it would be 12-18 months, some using the spending of the Korean War (as compared to the Vietnam War spending):

> The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in mid-1953. As displayed in the following figure, US inflation soared in late 1950 but returned to around 2 percent in 1952 and 1 percent in 1953.[3]

* https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in...

* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/opinion/covid-biden-econo...

This has lead to some lifestyle changes for me. Much less meat due to the rising cost. Installed a Bidet on a whim the moment the TP situation started last year, best investment of my life. I traded in my truck last month for almost as much as I paid brand new for a brand new car. Some things are harder to find, or the prices have gone up and so I've just either switched to cheaper options or just stopped buying them at all.

I have an oddly personal question with a bit of oversharing thrown in for good measure :-) What make/model of Bidet? Been looking to install one. I've been thinking of one that heats the water, like I used in Japan. But maybe that's not needed.

I bought a Tushy bidet recently. Works very well. Very pleased with it. I have found that I don't need a hot water hookup, even though the model has the capability.

I have a hose with brushed nickle nozzle that looks like a small garden hose [1]. It takes a while to learn how to aim (hint: ease in with low pressure first). I still use TP to dry off, but like a few squares.

It looks kinda like this but with a curvier handle:

https://www.amazon.com/Handheld-Toilet-Adjustable-Pressure-F...

You don't need a fancy motorized electric thing (I don't trust cleaning all those little nozzles and angles). I started using this after I stayed with a Muslim friend in Morocco years ago. I had no choice but learn, and now I'm hooked. My partner thinks it is gross, tho. /shrugs/

I have a bidet at home and wish they were more common in the US.

But how is it gross to rinse a dirty part of your body with potable water? I think it's grosser to use the bathroom for solid waste and expect rubbing it off with tissue paper is going to result in an equally clean outcome compared to rinsing with water.

You're preaching to the choir! :) I've tried every angle to explain...

I installed the same ones in all our bathrooms. I fell in love with it after a business trip to India. It took until the TP shortage for my partner to agree and now they love it as well.

The most precise one I’ve ever used was the “butt gun” style, but there was a learning curve and it’s not suited to every toilet. Toto makes a nice integrated-seat one, but IMO it changes the geometry of the commode and makes doing the job less comfy. Ymmv

I'm super happy with my Toto Washlet C200 (SW2044). Not cheap but it has the main features you know from Japan. The only tricky bit was fishing the electrical down the wall and using an angle grinder cutting wheel to make the hole in the tile for the outlet box.

A cheap $40 model on Amazon. I'm in Texas so don't need heated.

This gave me flashbacks of last winter's energy outages.

$38 and I highly recommend it.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A0RHSJO/ref=ppx_yo_dt...

I bought one of those years back when I was "bidet curious". I'm still using it, as it does the job well enough. I don't need my butt blow-dried nor do I require warmed water, so I just keep using this one instead of upgrading to something ten times the cost.

My wife still refuses to use it, even when we were still scrambling to find TP.

You can even "save with used" on that page. $27.76

> oddly personal question

If someone shares that they installed a bidet, I thinking asking which model is a pretty reasonable followup.

I've been thinking of one that heats the water, like I used in Japan

I was thinking that, too, before I bought the $38 Amazon special referenced in other comments below. To get heated water, I'd have to run wiring and an outlet, and...oh, screw it, try it without the heat and if it's not acceptable I'll buy a better one and do the electrical work.

phhhhht, it's fine, and I'm glad I didn't go to the trouble. It's a nice-to-have, but not worth tearing apart drywall to run wiring, IMO. OTOH, if you have an outlet in a convient-to-reach location (e. g., under the toilet), then YOLO.

I haven't tried cold water so I'm not sure what it's like, but this would be highly dependent on climate. Up north in the winter, cold water is quite cold. Of course, if the pipes go though interior walls for a very long distance through your living space before reaching the toilet, then you'll have a decent temperature unless you flush (or run the sink, etc.) just prior.

"Old work" electrical boxes are specifically designed to be added without tearing apart the drywall (other than making a clean hole, obviously). The lack of romex staples over a fished wire in such scenarios is typically acceptable by code. Now if the bathroom isn't immediately above a basement or immediately below an attic, it might indeed be impossible to avoid some demo.

I'm from Uruguay, and all bidets have hot and cold water from the plumbing (our housing is built after European standards).

No idea how they do it in Japan.

Yeah, I think this shortage will be a good lesson to a lot us used to overabundance of Everything. I also hope companies who are forced to reshore some of their business learn that the wages they have been paying are just too low.

> I’ve just either switched to cheaper options or just stopped buying them at all.

Same here.

Several years ago I went through a period of bringing in 1/8 of my previous income over a stretch of two years. I had to tap into deep savings to stay afloat. In that stretch, I realized how much money was wasted on things that had absolutely no positive impact in my living situation.

When the pandemic came around, I was blessed in keeping a stable job and continued to earn a comfortable wage, yet I found myself going back to a simpler mindset.

And you know, I’ve been a lot happier. For example, I used to eat out all the time because I never had time to cook. Once that changed, what became one of my favorite meals was (apparently) a depression-era staple. Go figure.

We’re so conditioned that in order to be good Americans, we have to be good consumers. The problem is, it’s gotten to an extreme level, and now we’re seeing how our out-of-balance lifestyles are actually problematic. Sure, there’s been ample profit, but these habits exact other costs we don’t see until it’s too late.

> my favorite meals was (apparently) a depression-era staple

Which one?

My guess, mac and cheese. Definitely a staple of mine during the lean college years.

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_04.html

"During the Depression, this self-sufficiency carried over into their social life. One-dish suppers and church potlucks were important ways to have fun and share food. On radio and in women's magazines, home economists taught women how to stretch their food budget with casseroles and meals like creamed chipped beef on toast or waffles. Chili, macaroni and cheese, soups, and creamed chicken on biscuits were popular meals."

Good ol' shit on a shingle.

Haluski. Cabbage, onions, egg noodles, butter, salt and pepper (to taste).

Eastern European comfort food. :)

Out of curiosity, which meal was that?

Haluski. :)

Could you talk some more about the things you found unnecessary?

It’s a bit broad, but spending money because it made me feel like I was doing something.

What a waste. I’d go to the bookstore, buy a stack of books — because I wanted to read and relax — only to fall asleep because I was so exhausted for running around. I’m kind of ashamed to even admit I lived a life like that.

But one positive about stockpiling those books over the years: the pandemic have me ample time to read some of them!

> For example, I used to eat out all the time because I never had time to cook.

I had a strangely opposite reaction during Covid: Recognizing that local restaurants would struggle, we doubled or tripled our usage of restaurants, plus a bump in tip on top. This was takeout, of course, but they would normally be dine-in experiences).

We still lost a couple of our favorite restaurants to closures but on a whole, the town came through pretty well.

that's about as useful as trying to fight global warming by keeping your fridge door open all the time.

Setting the "wait for the US government to pass effective relief legislation" option aside for the moment, restaurants are a local business with local customers. Increasing patronage seems a fairly obvious way to support them to me and as a bonus, I don't have to cook.

Turn the cynicism down a bit, will ya?

I think you’re in for a surprise, if you think the restaurant closures from COVID are over with. I think a staggering number of businesses took loans to weather storm that will have lasted longer than anyone expected. Let’s see what your local scene looks like in two more years.

If anything, I think the restaurants that have already closed down, or possibly the ones with a better financial sense then the majority.

It's like real-life Factorio: one conveyor jams and every downstream machine on the pipeline needs to be manually un-fucked!

Seriously though, I'm glad I don't need a car, computer, or home repair. Friends in tech are telling me 50-100 week lead times on parts. (Like the Intel NIC article on HN last week.)

Anecdotally, since the early 2000's I have had trouble finding contractors to do small home improvement jobs (under 50k). For at least two decades, only big jobs get bid, the rest require handymen. Not that I have a problem with handymen, just that they often shouldn't handle jobs that really require a team. So it feels like the comment about construction has never really been alleviated in my experience. It's like airlines and baggage fees: they told it is was due to 9/11 and fuel costs, and were only temporary, yet they persist.

Wes of Watch Wes Work[0] constantly complains about multi-month lead times on previously common car parts.

I've noticed plenty of products that I used to order on-demand now having multi-month lead times - like my contacts. My doctor gave me ten lenses, but said I might not see my annual order of lenses arrive for six to eight weeks. I guess I'll get used to readers :)

0: https://www.youtube.com/c/WatchWesWork

I like the Factorio comparison. It's great to show the complexity of manufacturing simple products and how transport delays in one area can affect the whole economy.

It's way too complex to make any blanket statements, but it stands to reason that at least some of these snarls and delays will resolve very quickly as capacity picks up again. It's a variation of the bank teller question discussed in another thread - if your bank teller can process 6 customers per hour, and 5.8 customers arrive per hour, the average wait time will be 5 hours. If you add a 2nd bank teller, the average wait time will be three minutes. So if some of these problems are similar to missing that second bank teller, those parts of the supply chain will speed up quickly when that's resolved.

Indeed we've already seen a remarkable supply recovery/price collapse in lumber.

Europe and the UK have the same problem. I wish they looked at this situation (inflation, stalled supply chains, energy price raises) from a global perspective instead of focusing on the US only

I have the impression a long awaited crisis is finally coming. Remember the stock market going up and up and the busloads of many invested in tech and ML?

At some point the bubble had to explode. The COVID-19 crisis was an unexpected black swan which is acting, belatedly, both as a retardant and as a trigger for the global, systemic, financial and economical crash that usually happens once a decade.

May I suggest that tech companies are so heavily valued because it seems reasonably possible for a single company to win the market on a global scale. We all know the absurd amount of money required to put out a mature service. Losing tons of money but getting there first is a winning strategy and practically delivers a monopoly.

Hopefully the market will correct by funneling money into distributed manufacturing. This will happen because money loves buying things, dislikes making things, but actively hates it when there's nothing to buy, nowhere to go, nothing to do.

I actually think repair and remanufacture is a great place for growth in this area. It's a lot easier to enter than full-blown factory production, AND it will help a stuff-rich society get some real utility out of all that crap sitting around in storage units, closets, and landfills.

Maybe I'm just in a good mood but I'm actually kind of excited for this.

There has been endless coverage of the supply side of current economic weirdness affecting the world, but scant coverage of the demand side. Yet if this blog post[0] that was discussed here a couple of weeks ago is to be believed spending on goods in the US shot up by 20% this year. It seems to me that even if global supply chains were working flat out and in perfect order we would still see huge disruptions given a shock to demand of that magnitude. I would love to see more detailed reporting from a knowledgeable source on this.

[0] https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...

Spending could go up, absent an increased demand, if lower supply raised prices

That's absolutely true, but is that what's happening? That seems like a really important question for this article (and the legion of others like it) to tackle. The linked article even mentions demand in the subhead, and then basically ignores it in the actual body. Thus my frustration.

Not exactly the detailed reporting you are looking for, but:

People normally spend a lot of their disposable income on travel/bars/dining/concerts/experiences/other similar categories that don't involve a lot of imported goods per dollar spent. Last year they shifted a lot of that spending to stuff, and when much of the population does that.....that buys a lot of stuff.

Anecdotally, among most people I know, that balance of how they spend their disposable income still hasn't returned to it's pre-pandemic state.

Welcome to issues large swathes of the world have been obliged to deal with all along. We’ll live.

> One possibility is that Americans adopt a sustainable, ascetic, and homespun lifestyle that reduces our dependency on goods that activate the global supply chain. If you can seriously envision such a world, I envy your gift of imagination.

> The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything.

Well, is it? The pandemic will pass but the various environmental crises created by the “more of everything” policy probably will oblige reduced consumption in some form.

Here's an upside. I've been waiting for 2 3/8 inch x 8 foot structural pipe for 3 months from a ranch store I shop at. Before prices went crazy I paid $26. They FINALLY got some in yesterday and the price was $22 per pipe!!!!

I have no idea why and I didn't question it. They said they ordered 200 and they got 14 of them. I only needed 6.

what a pipe dream!

For clarification, are you saying you needed two pipes measuring 3/8" by 8' or a single pipe that is 2.375" wide by 8' long?

Edit: What's wrong with asking a simple question?

2.375" Outside dimension. Plumbers use inside dimension, this would probably be a 2" pipe for them. This is an outdoor fencing application and this place refers to it's outside dimension because there are other vendors that make attachments that work on the outside of the pipe. Galv. steel pipe.

I actually understand the difference between tube and pipe measurments. I've just never been a fan of fractions in written sentences as it can lead to confusion. Really, just never been a fan of fractions. Not blaming you for US standards of measurment.

In plumbing, you find a 2" pipe and a 2" elbow. I would have assumed it translated the same in fencing so that a 2" post has a matching 2" fitting. It doesn't matter if 2" represents ID or OD, but within the same industry I would assume all measurements were applied the same.

He said: "I only needed 6"

I'm starting to feel like I'm the AI and I have a terrible GAN.

English is fun!!! What sounds clear to one person can be confusing to another.

Were you implying surprise that the $22 price was lower than they were before the recent craziness or that the price was nearly double the original price. That's what I was attempting to get to in my original question. I didn't get ask explicitly, as I was hoping to get there on my own. However, my simple asking of a question to help me understand caused other readers to suggest I was wandering too far from subject. Pfft to them anyways.

Because it's an irrelevant question to the post or the rest of the discussion? The answer matters not.

But the OP sentence is like a sudoku. 2 3/8 is ambiguous. It could be 2 pipes or a measurement. If you read all the way to the end you see that he bought 6 pipes so it must be a measurement.

This would be a great test for an AI language comprehension system though. Perhaps you are an AI?

yes, but 2 at $26 before price went crazy means each at $13. new shipment comes in, they are now $22 each. For 6 pipes at old price, that's potentially $78 vs $132 at new price.

So the numbers actually do matter. As I stated in another reply, I'm just not a fan of fractions especially in written sentences.

Edit: Or if it was actually $26 per 2.375" pipe and the new prices after craziness was only $22 causing the reaction to go in the other direction.

Yeah sorry about the weird fractions. I've been doing a lot of building/wood working and being lazy at the computer. Both prices were PER PIPE.

It was more expensive PER PIPE for the 2.375" pipe BEFORE and it is cheaper now. So I don't fully understand why, if there's a shortage, they wanted to price it lower. :shrug: I'm happy I got some at all.

>This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys.

Yes. I needed some simple parts for a home repair job I'm doing. In the before times I would have been able to find them all at one Home Depot, in abundance. I had to go to three Home Depots, two Lowes, and one Ace Hardware to find everything I was looking for.

I really hope this reduces our reliance (American here) on outsourcing everything and revives manufacturing in America. I believe manufacturing know-how and national security are correlated.

I agree, but I don't see how to unwind the tangle we have created. Sometimes, things can be too cheap. We have been sucked into the race to the bottom on prices for goods so that everything is made somewhere else. We did it to ourselves in the end really.

The problem is that it's more than price that drove some of the manufacturing overseas. For example, from my life, I was looking at getting an 'American made' large piece of woodworking equipment.

All manufacturers, regardless of label, get their cast-iron parts from the same place in China. This isn't for price; we're talking about different brands that range in price, for this tool, from $500-$2800. The top of the top end is what I purchased, because I had extra money due to no travel during covid. It is built in America with American parts, except the cast-iron; it still has Chinese cast-iron.

The reason was because of environmental regulations.

So, if we do shift manufacturing back, we need to either be cool with shit-tons of pollution, or be searching desperately, now, for solutions to that pollution.

To be clear, I desperately want more made in America goods. The quality is just better. From woodworking - Pony clamps were made in Chicago, Il, and are still the best clamps your money can buy. Now they're made in the clamp factory in China and the quality shows that shift.

> So, if we do shift manufacturing back, we need to either be cool with shit-tons of pollution, or be searching desperately, now, for solutions to that pollution.

If we want to bring manufacturing back, and we want to continue to with today's low prices, then we need to be cool with pollution.

Dealing with byproducts can definitely be done. It just has costs and those costs have to be passed to the consumer in way way or another.

And that's true regardless of the factory's physical location. It's just a lot easier for Americans to ignore when it's out of their sight.

Sorry, that's what I meant, I just wasn't clear I guess.

We either need to be okay with the pollution being here, in our yards, or work to fix it now, which inherently comes with a price increase.

You're absolutely right – modern supply chains are incredibly complex with lot of upstream dependences that are hard to control. It's not going to be an overnight shift, but I hope it changes the outsourcing-for-lowest cost mentality.

There are other tech innovations on the horizon that I hope will further improve the issue. For example, Canada now has technology that's upending Al manufacturing reducing GHG emissions. There's a demo smelter with this new tech running in Canada. Pretty secretive, and not yet producing at scale, but it's game-changing. I have some knowledge of this speaking to experts in the Al industry. Here's a snippet from an article[0] that talks about it:

Elysis has developed a process that substitutes carbon with inert materials—it won’t say what they are—to make the anode that conducts the electricity causing the chemical reaction. “We use noncarbon materials that do not react, and as a consequence you get the separation of aluminum on the one side and oxygen on the other,” says Christ, who’s spent 36 years working to create carbonless aluminum. “It’s absolutely magic how we do that, but the explanation is very simple, actually.

After successfully developing an emissions-free prototype smelter that produced a small amount of green aluminum used in some Apple laptops in 2019, Elysis built a pilot plant in Saguenay, Quebec, about five hours northeast of Montreal. Rio Tinto and Alcoa don’t allow photos to be taken of the closely guarded factory. Even knowing the measurements of the layout could tip off competitors, says Vincent, who’s now chief executive officer of the joint venture. “You’re the only person on the planet who will see this, other than our board,” Christ said to a Bloomberg writer.

Not a problem that can be solved overnight – we've eroded manufacturing expertise and capacity for various reasons over the years, but I hope culturally and politically, we push ourselves to create new, greener tech and move towards local manufacturing.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/with-a-pu...

I think the quality issue has more to do with consumers by and large having no money to grant choice within the market for anything except the cheapest available. The GDP growth all goes to the rich, and the dwindling wages go to rent seekers

At some point, China might actually put in restrictions on pollution as well. With their interest in Africa, I would not be surprised to see China being intersted in moving some of their dirty manufacturing to Africa.

> The reason was because of environmental regulations.

It's also because shipping a 100 pound lump of iron from China is too stupidly cheap.

Shipping something of that weight halfway around the globe should not be cheap. That causes a lot of perverse incentives.

Can’t you check availability in stores online, before you go out?

Yes, but I've never needed to before - ever. So I went to the first Home Depot, expecting everything to be there as usual. At that point I did start looking at other stores on my phone. No one store had everything I needed. I purchased a few things at every store I visited because those things were only available at that one store.

I liked this comment from the article:

Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.

There is a real problem in today's society which is the today's so called progressives worldview and divisive mentality.

Don't you find that there's a fair bit of irony in the statement you just made?

Nope. What is the irony?

You're lamenting divisiveness while blaming one group as the sole source of the problem. That itself is divisive.

Yeah I corrected myself to "so called progressives". They are really nihilists instead.

Nothing about your correction erases the irony.

Edit: It should be pointed out that your other posts in this thread only further highlight your own divisiveness.

So the claim is that no one group can be singled out as a cause of division? That means one would be unable to ever say that some person or group of people is divisive, which means there's no such thing as divisive speech (since labeling anything as such is apparently itself so divisive that one becomes a hypocrit).

You should not be reading my statement as an absolute; it is circumstantial/contextual.

>So the claim is that no one group can be singled out as a cause of division?

Come on, it's probably true for a lot of things.

This is the kind of backward thinking that the wealthy hypocritically espouse. There is no shortage if you have too much money. The wealthy dont need a covid test from a (poor to middle class as Dave Chapelle mentions in Closer) mediocre everything store when they have a personal physician.

Without the wealthy (who run the company), we wouldn't have great products, and jobs, and pursuing our careers and self interests.

The wealthy dont create products. Working class people do. It is a brain worm that has convinced you that the managerial class deserve to be rich but the working class dont

This kind of division you put is exactly what I am talking about. Most of the employees of successful companies don't share your views or think of themselves as us vs them and fall into your classification of the working class. They are pretty happy there working with a great CEO hence making great products/providing services.

Cite your sources.

You mention "most", but that is not an easy qualifier to back up. More likely, it is "some".

Wealth is relative concept. So its bizarro in the first place to create this kind of division. Anybody can take his money and put out a business, so he becomes capitalists or them to speak in your terms.

Likewise someone in a poor third world country sees them as working class and people complaining here as rich but a whiner.

This isn't a division invented by me. It is a division that is put in place by those with money and power. You are talking about a fictional company with a "Great CEO" and employees are "pretty happy" with their position and pay. Even with your platonic ideal of what a "Great CEO" is, you'd have a hard time justifying the pay gap between bottom rung workers and C-suite

Your division mentality is just irresponsibility. Why is the pay gap between C-suite and workers?

Because it is not easy to hire C-suite executives who makes careful decisions to steer the company in the right direction. Companies are subject to profit and losses. Its not static. Do you know how many round of interviews there are to hire C-suite? >16 interviews over a period of 3-6 months.

Workers are in abundance competing for the same role. If I were hiring between 100 workers, everyone put our their bid of the salary, I would be looking for best offer and best quality. That is in-fact a reality of the free market.

There is nothing stopping you from creating your own company and paying out your workers what you think is fair. I even encourage you to do just that. But to complain that all rich band together and create this working class and pay them low-wages is simply irresponsible of yourself.

If your education has misled you I am sorry.

Workers are in abundance who would go through said 16 interviews to become CEO, however, they are prefiltered by pedigree so only the rich are interviewed

This sounds like HR is tapping on the marketing/PR people

USSR tried putting workers and peasants before the entrepreneurs and elites. Didn’t turn out well

It seems like the so-called progressives want to take a stab at solving socialism again by making everyone miserable.

Yes, it blows my mind that in the last century not one, but 2 countries have been divided in half producing as perfect AB-test of capitalism vs socialism as one could imagine and people still think socialist economy is a great idea. Not to mention dozens of other socialist countries which produced nothing but misery for their people.

Exactly, mob ruling never works. No matter how extreme length you go to prove it. So many examples, but somehow either they don't learn the history or this time it will be different. They are most the ignorant and the irresponsible.

Most normal people just want freedom to work, freedom to trade and pursue their own interests and helping those in their circles, not being enslaved to everyone else.

>Most normal people just want freedom to work, freedom to trade and pursue their own interests and helping those in their circles, not being enslaved to everyone else.

Then they should welcome negative interest rates because that is exactly what they do.

Thats totally a different discussion and don't see how that is related. Monetary supply/control is a centrally planned policy.

I really don't think the only options are US style socialism for the elites and austerity for the rest versus USSR totalitarianism.

Just look at any other developed country in the world to see more reasonable social welfare programs

this is false dichotomy invoked every time in discussions like these. Totalitarianism is a property of political system, not economic one. South Korea was not democracy by any stretch of imagination for quite some time. China is totalitarian but very capitalist in most of their economy, hence their success.

Also - do not confuse socialism (as in economic system) and social democracy (political system).

I didn't give a dichotomy, I called out one. A straw man was given that any sort of reform is paramount to big S Socialism which """has failed every time its been tried"""

Political systems are not separate from economic ones.

The USSR failed not because they had an economic agenda of equality. They failed because their system of governance wasn’t capable of actually accomplishing those goals. The USSR just replaced one class of elites with another.

It failed because the idea of “the means of production owned by the state” does not work.

They failed because their roadmap did not include a workable route to the equality they wanted. Their roadmap led that their system of governance.

Why did their roadmap lead there? Essentially, because it was against human nature. It turns out that "work for the good of all mankind" doesn't motivate as well as "work for the good of yourself and your family". They had to add "work for the good of all mankind, or be punished" in order for the system to work at all.

Now, the really interesting question: Will any system that has an agenda of economic equality end in the same place? Can any system have that as a goal, and produce a system of governance that isn't (approximately) equivalent to the USSR version? I suspect that the answer is no. If your humans have the same human nature as the humans of the USSR, then you wind up running into the same problems that the USSR ran into. If your system doesn't account for human short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness, it isn't going to work in the real world.

> Essentially, because it was against human nature.

I've heard this counterargument against socialism/communism for a long time, and it always sounds like a form of "magical thinking" to me. Asserting the tautology that "humans are naturally greedy" when if you know any actual humans, you know this is not true.

Short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness are all easily handled by a functioning criminal justice system, and public education system. At least in THIS country, we willfully subverted and destroyed these institutions, over a long period of time. For various reasons, but mostly because the haves wanted it this way. The same happened in the USSR.

A few entitled and already very wealthy people are greedy. Most of the rest of us will ACT greedy when they've been deprived of basic necessities by a crooked and rigged system. But by and large, most people are not inherently greedy.

> Short-sightedness, selfishness, greed, and laziness are all easily handled by a functioning criminal justice system, and public education system.

You really think we can educate short-sightedness out of people? Or laziness? I think you're kidding yourself.

But more: You think "the haves" are greedy. But the haves usually got the good education. It didn't fix the problem.

And, even if the majority of people are in fact not greedy (or power hungry), it only takes a minority of greedy, power-hungry people to ruin things. Take the USSR. Those who were power-hungry and ruthless wound up in power. They produced what such people produce, no matter what the ideology and the rhetoric said.

If you're going to create an ideal system, you have to keep those people from ruining it. And the answer isn't to create a system powerful enough to keep those people in check, because those people will be drawn to the power they can have by running the system. Soon enough, they'll be in power - if not this generation, then the next.

Utopians always bank on the perfectibility of human nature. The available evidence is strongly against that view of humanity. And no, fixing the education system and the criminal justice system won't do it. They will help, and we should by all means pursue both fixes. But they won't let us build a utopia.

Damn straight and right on.

Working class people alone wouldn't create shit. They have to be provided tools, trained to do the job, and then overseen, so that they do not fuck it up. That's why many industries prefer to replace them with robots. You vastly overestimate the role of working class people in creating consumer goods.

I agree. The downvotes rain are coming, but this categorisation of working class vs wealthy, (Infact I am a working class according to them) from so called progressives (really nihilists) is cause normal everyday people problems for their agenda. We don't need your help. We can stand our grounds.

Just because you can't understand what a group aspires to doesn't make them nihilists. Is this coming from the Jordan Peterson book of philosophy?

The result speaks for itself. There isn't much understanding to do at this moment. If this group wants to throw themselves off the cliff, I am not willing to go with them.

From the perspective of a _more_ socialist (but still ultimately capitalist) European country, it seems that the group throwing themselves off a cliff are the more purist capitalist types in America. There are other solutions than full-on Soviet-style planned economies.

Ultimately, we live in a society - a rising tide lifts all boats.

Unfortunately, this kind of nuance seems to be lost for a lot of people. They hear, "Rich people bad," or, "Universal healthcare," and assume that whoever said that craves full-blown Communism, which is typically far from the truth.

Us vs Them, people at the top and working class division isn't helping either.

... says the person stoking "us vs them" (OP vs "so called progressives") division heavily throughout this thread.

Who orders the tools? Decide which tools to implement? Actually implement and conduct the training? Does the actual hands-on management of each working class employee?

Certainly not the person at the very top.

You forgot to mention, at each of these steps the ones with the most experience tend to climb the rank up the "top" and become "them".

Actually, I didn't. Note that I referred to "the person at the very top". Statistically, those you're referring to will likely only reach middle and upper management, not C-level. There are significantly stark differences between management and C-level employees as it pertains to this conversation.

Look at other comments complaining about C-Suite. I don't know what is stopping you from creating your own company and building your own ideals and subjecting yourself to everyday company, business faces: profit and losses.

Public companies are just bunch of share holders who just happen to have capital, you could be one too.

You mean your downvoted comments that already have good responses to them? No thanks, I won't be going around in circles with you; it's tremendously obvious that your biases prevent you from actually having a constructive conversation about this issue.

That only explains why they own the company, not why they deserve a higher salary or why the workers deserve getting paid as little as possible. It also doesn't explain why we should have an inflexible labor market where people compete for scarce full time jobs and we then have to figure out ways to pad the jobs so that everyone can pretend to work full time.

i disagree, wealthy people create products. they own the means of production. workers don't produce shit as they don't own the machines.

this is not true for homebuilding. which is a huge sector of the us economy.

> Without the wealthy (who run the company), we wouldn't have great products, and jobs

I watch birds fly around, and they seem to need no wealthy heir birds, inheriting the right to expropriate the value of surplus worker time of the birds searching for seeds to eat. "We", the poor humans, apparently need the wealthy to have jobs. The inhabitants of Sentilinese Island and the hunter gatherers still roaming around the Amazon seem to make do without these wealthy people bestowing the gift of jobs upon them. I suppose Russians had the beneficence of the czar and his family to thank for their living as well - that is until the Bolsheviks blasted and then bayoneted them all. Somehow, jobs seemed to continue in Russia after they were gone.

Communist Russia is a terrible example if you want to argue against capitalism/private companies/"bosses". Everyone there was equally poor (except for a tiny elite, which was slightly less poor), and the system worked so badly that it imploded.

You are making the assumption that the people who run the company _must_ be wealthy which is not something that has to be so.

Take Japan Airlines CEO. Certainly well paid but does not earn the crazy amounts that western CEOs of large companies tend to earn.

You can have everything you stated as a benefit without the requirement of a person who runs the company having to be wealthy.

Why?

They are obligated to spend their money (investments count as spending) or work less. Waiting for billionaires to retire and then recognize that they don't need the money by doing philanthropy is like getting spit in the face for laziness by the person who told you don't have to work.

Remember when Covid tests were scarce, and the rich and powerful were getting special access to them?

The argument here is that without abundance Covid tests don’t make it to the mediocre everything store.

We call that capitalism... this is my biggest concern from the “universal basic income” argument.

Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working. The system starts to falter and honestly it looks like it could collapse.

I'm a big fan of tying the basic income directly to tax revenue collected (ideally monthly instead of yearly). That way, people can adaptively choose how much work they want to do, and it feeds back from what the actual economic production is.

Basic income is really complementary to capitalism. It provides a cushion to people on the very bottom, allowing them to stay in the game, and for other people it helps push them out of a subsistence loop and into "maybe I should start a small business" or "Hmm, I've saved enough that I could pay my bills with basic income so I could retrain on this new technology" etc.

Totally agree with you. The nihilists want to burn everything to the ground so they can prove themselves wrong.

> Effectively, we are seeing what happens when people stop working

There are a huge number of inputs going into supply chain breakdowns, and I find all of these takes to be wildly oversimplistic.

Taking a look at even just one aspect, the chip shortage: what you're seeing is a combination of underestimated demand (manufacturers assumed demand would decrease during Covid), bottlenecks in production, factory shutdowns, inflexible scheduling and sourcing, transportation difficulty, increasing demand from both companies/individuals who have shifted to remote and from cryptocurrency attention, etc...

And all of these shortages affect each other too, increasing and redirecting other goods and services, which can form complicated feedback loops. Chip shortages make transportation harder, which makes it harder to manufacture chips.

Employment is certainly a factor, but it's also certainly not the only factor. We are seeing stress fractures in a global system right now. There is no one cause (other than I guess the existence of Covid in general), and there is no single, one policy that anyone, Progressive or Conservative, can pass to fix the problem.

Anyone (Progressive or Conservative) who is trying to sell you the current shortage as simple proof of their ideology is not doing a good job of looking at the issue from a holistic perspective.

I honestly don't get why companies cut orders. Just keep producing. If you have too much inventory then you get to reduce production whenever it is convenient. If you cut production beforehand you just get screwed.

Because those orders have to be paid for. When the bill is due, what good is a warehouse full of finished products nobody's buying?

Income sharing (like UBI) doesn't work because the underlying problem is the unfair allocation of work. If you're going to redistribute something why not just tell the person with too much money to work less and the person with too little money to just work more? In that sense, it is the act of work piling that is unfair because the person that ends up with all the work doesn't intend to actually make use of all the money he earns in the process.

The problem with the rich isn't that they earn too much, it's that they spend too little on consumption or investment.

Anybody have an example of progressives advocating redistribution of something that we don't have an abundance of? I can't think of one.

You might say housing, but I don't think I've heard anyone call for the "redistribution of housing", because that doesn't really make sense. Progressives generally call for universal housing, and redistribution of wealth to achieve that goal.

Inclusionary zoning (which I support with caveats) is literally housing redistribution. The people renting at market rate are subsidizing the people renting at below market rate. If that isn’t redistribution I don’t know what is. Especially in cities that set an IZ rate so high it drives up market rate rents to luxury levels (looks at SF).

Why do you think that the people that rent at market rate subsidise the people that rent below market rate?

Developers won’t build an apartment that won’t financially pencil out. Roughly speaking the developers will take whatever cost is required for IZ, and then add it to the costs of building a market rate unit. If the costs exceed the market rate, the project won’t be built because it’s unprofitable. This in turn increases the price of housing that winds up on the market (this assumes there are projects on the tipping point of penciling out vs. not). It’s essentially a tax.

There’s a fair amount of research on this, here’s one paper if you’re interested in learning more: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol23num...

And progressives generally do not call for a total redistribution of wealth but only a more equitable redistribution.

I think positive rights like a right to housing(housing first homeless programs) and healthcare(people have a right to medical care) are a great example and I don't know why you are dismissing them as examples.

Redistribution in my understanding would mean taking away someone's housing or healthcare and giving it to someone else. I don't think I've heard anyone advocate for that. Since there are ways to achieve universal housing and healthcare without taking it away from anyone (which is what universal means), I don't think declaring them to be human rights means you support their redistribution.

To be clear, I'm sure you can find some random Twitter user who thinks we should eat the rich and then give their homes to the homeless, but I'm thinking about progressive politicians and writers and people significant to the movement.

I hear that quite frequently whenever somebody says they want to build more to reduce the housing shortage.

The first step is kicking out existing residents, and the second step is buulding, and the the third step is bringing in new, richer residents.

Areas of LA just got rezoned from single family home to multi-family homes. You just know there will be properties purchased for the sole intent of knocking down the existing structures to build apartments/condos/etc. That seems like redistribution of housing to me.

I guess I disagree with your definition of redistribution. That seems like increasing supply to me.

"purchased" and "redistribution" are kind of contradictory. That's just the market.

Well, upzoning, particularly in formerly single-family home single-use residential streets near major cities like LA and SF Bay at the moment would generally result in the transfer of properties from multimillionaire NIMBY retirees and mid-aged administrators down to more working class condo/townhouse/duplex/splitlevel owners. It's a market-based solution for existing systemic inequality.

I still don't follow. The NIMBY retiree would have to sell their property to presumably someone with a lot more capital than them to be able to build an apartment building.

If you are referring to tenants possibly being lower socioeconomic status than the previous owner.. that isn't redistribution. If anything its the opposite, since now the property owner is probably a corporation

"Allowing market participants to more efficiently use expensive land" seems like allowing a (housing) market to work, rather than "forced re-distribution".

Land owners having more freedom to profitably use their land doesn't really seem like redistribution to me..

Yes, single family zoning is an unfair redistribution from people renting apartments to home owners.

"properties purchased for the sole intent of knocking down the existing structures to build apartments/condos/etc"

That seems like a particularly cogent example of the Free Market/Capitalism/Invisible Hand at work, at least to me.

The curious thing, again, it seems to me, is the idea that other people who don't have an ownership interest in the "properties purchased" should have a veto in what the purchaser can do with said properties is presented as the Free Market/Capitalism/Invisible Hand just doing its thing.

If the new zoning regulations prohibited building single family housing, well that would be (again, it seems to me) bad too. Do they?

Redistribution of wealth creates a redistribution of "everything" as a byproduct.

We do have an abundance of housing. There are millions of empty homes/housing units. Housing redistribution would involve cracking down on the landlord class to release those homes from exploitative pricing and rental strategies.

What are you proposing by "cracking down"? I disagree with your sentiment but do think that it is absurd the federal government subsidizes mortgages on second homes. But I haven't heard a single proposal from the left to eliminate that welfare program for the wealthy.

Probably because once you get away from the coasts, you realize that a lot of people with second homes are not what you'd typically think of as wealthy. Around here a second home is often a cabin "Up North" or a trailer home on a few acres where you go hunting a few times a year or spend weekends. Something your average electrician or plumber can afford.

Good luck to any politician that goes up against that!

Just to be clear, Landlords and Home Owners aren't the same. I do live in a coastal city, but I think even rural/suburban areas would agree that the real estate market has made home ownership less and less achievable. I suppose that the issue I'm concerned with is more generally about the American real estate market at large, landlords/the rent cycle are just a part of that.

We don't have an abundance of housing compared to past times. In desirable-to-live areas there are severe housing shortages, largely due to NIMBY activists opposing new construction of housing in those desirable-to-live areas because they want to protect and further inflate the price of their own property by using the government to artificially constrain the supply.

Healthcare is another example.

The general point here is: what good is a right to X during a shortage of X? As in "what good is a right to food during a famine?"

I understand and agree with the general point, I just don't think progressives need to be taught this lesson. Everyone understands this.

Healthcare is an example of something we have a shortage of, especially during the pandemic. Are there progressives calling for redistribution of healthcare? I don't think universal healthcare implies redistribution, I think it implies more healthcare that costs less.

Universal healthcare wouldn't really create more supply. It would just redistribute the supply more evenly. There would likely be longer queues for many non-emergency treatments.

Either you have long wait times for non-critical things with critical needs met. Or you have short wait times for non-critical things, but critical needs are not met.

I think the latter is a much worse situation, and it’s the status quo. I agree that increasing supply is necessary to solve both aspects of the problem. But keeping people alive should be the most important priority of any health care system, not keeping wait-times short for non-critical procedures.

Well how do you differentiate critical versus non-critical needs? Canada has universal healthcare but they ration care by restricting supply, which results in long wait times for certain treatments. If a patient needs a hip replacement and is in severe pain is that critical or non-critical?

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/podcast/2018/o...

I don't really understand what you mean, universal healthcare means everyone has access to healthcare. Increasing the supply of medical facilities and staff is obviously a core part of implementing that in the US. If the government pays for healthcare but there aren't enough beds for everyone who needs one, then by definition it isn't universal.

Most universal healthcare proposals essentially amount to expanding Medicare for all. That would do nothing to increase supply. The two issues aren't necessarily linked.

We have a shortage of physicians today. The primary bottleneck in producing new licensed physicians is a lack of federal funding for residency program slots. Congress could increase funding for that immediately if they wanted to.

Market demand for healthcare services is essentially infinite. Regardless of the funding model there will always be some type of rationing. Some patients won't get everything that would benefit t them.

The actual Medicare for All bill in Congress as we speak has plenty of provisions to increase supply. Minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, minimum physician staffing levels, maximum wait time standards, "health professional education expenditures sufficient to meet the need for covered health care services", a capital expenditures budget to improve facilities, etc. I don't think we need to debate the details here though, we all agree that more doctors and more hospitals would be necessary.

"Medicare for All" is a convenient shorthand, it doesn't literally mean "just let everyone sign up for Medicare and change nothing else".

> Market demand for healthcare services is essentially infinite.

This is kind of an insane claim to me, can you back that up somehow?

Setting requirements for staffing ratios is meaningless. It doesn't mean the resources actually exist, or that anyone will be held accountable.

Sick people generally want the best possible treatment with extensive personal care by expert providers. Obviously it's not feasible to give that level of service to everyone.

I can't paste the whole bill here but you're welcome to read it, your concerns are covered: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1976.... And yes I agree that not everyone can get personalized world-class care for any issue, there will be limits to what is universally provided.

Money. The calls for universal income of $1k/mo make absolutely no sense when you do the math.

You have a fair point, in that pure redistribution rarely causes an issue. But the general point, that you need to make sure an abundance of something exists for the government to ensure it is available to the poor, very much applies to housing. . Rent controls and requiring new developments to include affordable housing lower incentives for developers to creating more housing, which results in the general market's housing prices being even worse in another decade due to static supply with increasing demand. Progressives trying to ensure both new and old housing is distributed to the poor has just made the housing situation worse in the cities it was attempted in. The government would have been much better off just building massive housing structures itself to deal with the issue, if it wanted to take a direct hand in it (the government producing things directly being the other way an abundance agenda can be pursued).

Where the quote goes wrong I think is bringing up progressives as if they're at fault for the current lack of abundance. The situation in the article is one where our attempts to create a massive economic surplus through global free trade have backfired. (Global free trade being a conservative/neoliberal plan where an abundance agenda is pursued by capitalistic methods.) This situation is a reminder that in capitalism, we optimize for profit, and optimizing for profit generally means having very little wiggle room for disruptions to a system. Making sure an abundance is available even during times of disruption is something that likely requires government intervention, not a lack of it.

This is reasonable, I guess affordable housing requirements and rent control could be considered a form a redistribution, because they take an already existing supply of housing and force them to be accessible to the poor. Good point.

It does sound a bit circular though - if developers are unwilling to build new housing if they're forced to make some of it affordable, why would they ever build any affordable housing at all if left alone by the government? I guess it depends on the details of the specific policy, so maybe too big a discussion for this thread.

The general the idea is that even if new housing isn't affordable, the existence of more housing overall lowers demand on older housing and therefore lowers prices. If you can encourage enough production of even luxury apartments, this forces the older apartments to lower rent as people capable of paying the old prices move to new locations. If enough houses are built, eventually you drive the price of the lower tiers of housing down far enough for the poor to afford (or at least the government to more easily fund access to.) Unfortunately, this is not a problem that can be solved quickly. The problem took us decades of under building new housing to get to, so it's not surprising it will take us time to get out of it either.

One big caveat here is it requires people to actually live in the housing. If real estate is being bought and sat on as a speculation tool (or used as something like an air B&B instead of a rental), it won't actually meet the demand for habitation. As such, some sort of regulation is needed to ensure that housing is actually either lived in or rented out.

Second issue is that, of course, NIMBYism is at least as big a threat if not more as price regulation. If things aren't allowed to be built due to local authorization either being impossible or the approval process taking ages to complete, requiring affordable housing be included is the least of your worries. Getting into the many flavors of NIMBY would indeed be too big a topic for this thread, but the overall effect on housing creation is definitely awful.

Edit: As a note, there is a massive incentive for those who currently own property to not want housing to be affordable. Lack of supply drives the prices way up, and the people who have seen the worth of their housing double in the last decade don't want prices to go back down to a reasonable level. Since homeowners generally make up a sizeable portion of voters in a given area...it's not too surprising that people constantly vote in ways that make building harder, no matter how hard that makes life for the next generation.

> if they're forced to make some of it affordable

How much does government regulation itself play in increasing the price of building a home to begin with? Some estimate 20-25%. Obviously we need some rules, regulations and standards, but I think we're also causing some of this issue and not factoring it in.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/nahb-regulatory-costs-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/09/30/the-verdi...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-rules-add-200...

Rent control seems like avoiding redistribution, since people aren't kicked out of their home to make way for someone richer. Neither does it kick a rich person out of their home to give it to a poor person. The distribution of the resource stays with the same people

We do have an abundance of housing, though. Around 17 million homes are vacant: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Vacancy&d=ACS%201-Yea...

In places no one wants to live. Settlement patterns change! It’s an urbanizing world, and there will always be some places in ascendance while others are in decline. It is perfectly natural for gluts and shortages to occur at the same time.

Let's take NYC for example. According to census data [1], Manhattan (a place many people definitely want to live) had a 10.5% vacancy rate last year. At almost 914,000 total housing units, that's almost 96,000 vacant homes.

According to the Bowery Mission [2], in the same time period there were 80,000 homeless people in NYC. So just in Manhattan, there were enough vacant homes for every homeless person in all five boroughs to get their own — with over 15,000 to spare!

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20... (change state to New York, click "Housing Unit Vacancy Rate" and then click Manhattan on the map)

[2] https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/

Again, in places nobody wants to live.

A janitors closet in NYC stops being a place you want to live when you have to be locked down in it

You may not want to, but there are objectively many, many people who do.

If we were going to make it illegal to sell or rent your vacant home to anyone but a homeless person, that might work. But there are probably a lot more than 15,000 migrants who can make competitive offers on those homes.

Then why are they empty?

One occupant moving out, cleaning, renovation, listing, showing, and getting to a new occupant's moving date is a process that takes some time. To the extent that apartments are turning over, some of them are going to be in this state at any given moment.

Except where universal housing would change the character of the neighborhood or be disruptive to existing communities, which is everywhere with a housing crisis.

Many online lefties are of the "fully automated luxury communism" flavor that presumes everything is plentiful and made by nobody.

Exactly. Everybody will have some kind of lifestyle job where they dick around a few hours a week on their muse and magically everything they ever want or need is provided for them by "the system".

They don't consider that the more likely outcome is them living in squalor while also going to a shitty job which they hate.

No, no, no. That won't happen. Not to them.

I wouldn't call them progressives. They are nihilists. They hate seeing the triumph of success.

I feel like I'm living in bizarro land. The lesson from a society that lives on the edge of over-consumption is ... more abundance?

We need a name for this ideology, the Mad Max mentality? It legitimately reminds me of those monster trucks driving through the climate change wasted landscape with people spitting what little gasoline they have left into the engine. shiny and chrome!

I don't think he's advocating over-consumption. The point is that if your policy goal is to re-distribute wealth you have to consider that your policies also have to make sure that the global supply chain is working smoothly. Otherwise the currently already disadvantaged groups are hit hardest.

I can easily pay extra or wait out the shortages but if you're just scraping by it's much harder to survive if the shelves are empty.

You're making a great point that I didn't find in OP. It muddies the waters to conflate holiday shopping with paper towel shortages.

This is what always kills my suspension of disbelief - the idea that somehow gasoline would be available in a post-apocalyptic world.

One zombie pulp fiction author - by the name of Jonathan Maberry - got it right though. In his work they drive quads fueled by ethanol.

If it helps, there's still a functioning oil refinery run in the Mad Max universe. It's basically declared by fiat that exactly those parts of civilization remain that are necessary to run war vechicles and make bullets. I think it was about answering the question, "what would happen if we only had the parts of modernity we didn't like."

Check out "pirate" oil refineries. They don't need to be very high tech:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-tLtqM8YU

The whole point of the article is that there is now scarcity of what was previously bountiful.

That misrepresents the argument. Progressives want to better distribute wealth so everyone can have reliable food, healthcare, and housing. The primary shortage in those areas in terms of necessity are where existing capital is located. More taxes on ultra high earners, closer to what they were at the start of the 20th century, would help achieve a lot regardless of good/labor shortages.

Additionally... I would happily sacrifice paper towels and vinyl for seats if it created more equity... but that's not what needs to happen at all. The article creates a false dichotomy.

That "lesson" old and is in essence one of the key points of socialist thought, especially but not exclusively in Marxism.

An additional, more radical view point would be that the term "redistribution" is misleading as wealth is generated by the worker and then extracted by private owners.

And what do they do with it? They cripple their ability to make things in exchange for short term gains:

> For decades, many U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas, taking advantage of cheaper labor and cheaper materials across the oceans. In normal times, America benefits from global trade, and the price of offshoring is borne by the unlucky few in deindustrialized regions.

>An additional, more radical view point would be that the term "redistribution" is misleading as wealth is generated by the worker and then extracted by private owners.

That primarily applies to monopolies like land or ISPs. Most markets work well because there is a reasonable amount of competition and the supply of goods can grow according to demand.

Do progressive really need this lesson? They aren't the ones who JITed the entire economy, it's the neoliberals and conservatives who did that. If anything, progressive ideas about onshoring supply chains and distributing resources more evenly would make the country actually robust against disasters, unlike today.

I'm disappointed this is front page HN as it seems a purely political piece of little value. The author supplies an anecdotal example and claims we should make more stuff here. Where are the details? What should we make and why?

Lots of liquidity has been created, worldwide, in attempts to keep people and businesses (big and small) afloat in lockdowns and/or "natural" consequences of the pandemic (e.g. reduced travel and so on, lots of industries would have seen trouble lockdown or not). Production surely did not grow in lockstep. What else would anyone expect other than prices catching up with money supply?

Although I read about the supply chain bottlenecks, I don't feel like it's impacted me yet. In fact it feels like there are more "Same Day" options than ever before (Amazon specific, but ditto for in-person shopping elsewhere). I live in NYC so not sure if that makes a difference or not.

I think it heavily depends on what type of goods you are buying. I've not seen issues for basic consumer goods, but in my professional role laptops and other goods that require chips are experiencing some significant delays. Steel roofing for the gazebo I'm building doubled in price, steel tubing for welding has gone way up and orders are delayed. My argon tanks for welding cost 25% more to fill today than pre-covid. Hard to say how much of this is shortage vs price gouging though.

Get a 3D printer? So far as I can tell, printer prices haven’t changed; filament prices haven’t gone up.

Can’t print toilet paper or paper towels but random I need a hook to hang something, or a fitting for a pipe that’s not under load, tons of stuff on thingiverse.

I'm almost certain that delivery of filament requires some kind of supply chain.

Also, last year, I wasn't able to get filament for about 3 months due to the pandemic.

I don't think the parent's point was that filament didn't have a supply chain, more that filament's supply chain was mostly undisturbed during the pandemic.

At no point was it hard to buy a 1KG spool of PLA as far as I know.

I did that haha, picked up a 3d printer so i could increase my manufacturing abilities.

It's been really good for printing brackets and things and simple replacement parts

Yes, how could I ever make a hook without three failed print attempts thrown in the trash first which will last millennia. If only there was some endlessly-recyclable material like steel or biodegradable material like wood which could be used.

But there is! You can easily buy degradable filaments, made of corn, wood powder and other materials.

Besides a few manufacturers (Toyota for example) changing their ways, as long as it's cheap to produce products and ship them half way across the world. The status quo will never change.

Most US industries will be given significant bail outs from Main Street, while Main Street itself is left to fend for themselves on meager public support pillars (if they even manage to get through to a person that is able to help them).

I think COVID-19 was a test of our global supply chain and we have failed. If a virus mutates and is even slightly worse than COVID-19, then we are truly fucked.

This is essentially another manifestation of inflation, except that instead of prices being fully adjusted upwards to balance supply and demand, we have shortages instead.

I mean the home covid tests in the first paragraph are potentially made in maine

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...

not really a global supply chain issue is it

Serious question: What about the parts and materials needed to make and package the tests (in Maine) - where do those come from, and can they easily get supply of those materials in the needed quantities and quality?

What is in them? Guessing, specialty paper, plastic, reagents, probably plastic &/or cardboard packaging... machines to make them if the production line didn't previously exist?

If theyr'e all local/regional, it'd be great, but if there's just that one missing component...

I saw this article and went and ordered a ton of nonperishable food, toilet paper, paper towels, soap, etc. from Costco. Likely making the problem worse.

This isn't really surprising to me, as this is what happens when you have lockdowns worldwide travel bans in place. The supply chain gets affected. It throws the market out of whack, imbalance in the prices, and most importantly people lives out of order. Years of work thrown down the tube by bunch of central planners. The economy consists of everyone working to support themselves and their families, not just the rich.

“That’s why Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan includes billions of dollars to reshore manufacturing, invest in basic research, and beef up domestic supply chains.” – everything has to be a political propaganda.

What's more a problem for me is that, I assume, any money to bring back manufacturing, outside of spooky market action at a distance, will just be pork and line pockets with no meaningful movement.

I hate that I've grown so cynical, and I don't know what to do with this hate, to be honest. It's not healthy, I'm certain of that.

The supply chain shock is compounded by the bullwhip effect and our just in time economy.

The first question I want to ask is why is HN filled with globalist agenda apologists?

There is no shortage of anything. True shortages are determined by nature, not by the economic manipulations of financiers and globalists, which means that most of the shortages are the consequences of policy decisions not natural events.

Take something such as the shipping shortage. During their Covid crisis a lot of shipping capacity was taken of the markets. Some companies actually destroyed some of their ships.

18 months later there is a shortage of shipping capacity, alleged. I don't think I am that bright, but if whole loads of shipping capacity are taken of the market in what is bound to be a temporary downturn, is it surprising that there will be shortages?

Lets take the truck driver shortage in the UK. The UK benefited from cheap labour from Eastern Europe as a result of Brexit, which led many qualified British drivers to give up the job because the pay was shit. To be honest even the cheaper labour from Eastern Europe considered it to be shit. Then you have Brexit followed by Covid, and many of the drivers from Eastern Europe have seen that the grass is not so green on the British side and don't see themselves coming back.

As for the truck drivers there about tens of thousands of fully qualified HGV drivers who simply not interested in the job. There is no shortage of HGV drivers, there is a shortage of employers who are willing to pay decent money not just in the short term, but in the long term to get the qualified drivers to commit. Funny how the media never mentions that. Truck drivers need to take a medical to get on the road, and even the NHS doctors who are supposed to be doing them are not doing them anymore. Funny how that never gets mentioned by the media.

In effect industry should stop blaming the govt for their own questionable pay policies. The country of zero hour contracts is feeling a labour shortage. Surprise!!

Then you have gas shortages. Remember Nordstream and Nordstream II, which the US government did its best to sabotage? Well Germany needs more gas and it isn't fully up yet. Are US gas companies ready to fill the gap?

Then of course you have this manufactured pandemic. Just because there is a new illness around doesn't make it a pandemic, a definition which was changed by WHO in order to serve a global agenda. The "developed" world adapted a "treatment" policy which involved taken painkillers and hoping that the disease would not develop enugh to warrant hospital admission. Even then they cooked the definitions to allow every positive test to labelled as actual disease even if there are no clinical symptoms, and use it as an excuse to warrant economic lockdowns.

Announcement of shortages isn't about real shortages. It is simply a way of priming consumers to expect higher prices in the future, as though demand has risen when it hasn't.

It is time the general public stopped being hoodwinked by mainstream media who are simply the mouthpieces of Big Finance which has not taken over Govt in the Western world.

The current gridlock in Congress is a blessing.

If they actually manage to pass either stimulus things are going to get really bad. There's not enough supply or labor for the bipartisan "bridges and roads" bill. There's not anywhere near enough labor for the partisan social bill.

If they actually pass it, given the way government runs, they'll overpay for everything to get supply, which costs extra, but worse it's going to take supply (both material and labor) away from regular businesses and people.

Is that the main reasoning for the republicans sitting out on it?

>There's not enough supply or labor for the bipartisan "bridges and roads" bill. There's not anywhere near enough labor for the partisan social bill.

Actually there is enough labor. What there isn't is a fair (inflation and productivity adjusted) wage for that labor.

>but worse it's going to take supply (both material and labor) away from regular businesses and people.

Isn't that a desirable trait? Shouldn't people pay more for things if they really want them? Why can't we let the "market" handle this?

Prices are only allowed to go down, it’s what the gods of consumerism have promised.

If consumerism is considered bad why aren't people working less instead of buying meaningless gadgets?

> Actually there is enough labor. What there isn't is a fair (inflation and productivity adjusted) wage for that labor.

That would imply there are people sitting around doing nothing waiting for higher wages. But that's not the case, there simply are not enough employees right now.

> Shouldn't people pay more for things if they really want them?

You just need to give the economy some time to catch up, and let supply catch up to demand.

> Why can't we let the "market" handle this?

Because the government is not the regular market. They are able to outbid others, and cause shortages that don't help anyone.

I should have made this clearer: I'm not saying never pass this funding, rather, just wait a little for the supply chain to catch up.

>But that's not the case, there simply are not enough employees right now.

Anecdotally a few of my neighbors have quit their minimum wage jobs for higher paying ones. There are enough employees at those wages. I know two people who have quit the job market and are living with their employed SOs/parents. Raise wages and people will sign up.[0]

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

   The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job declined by 835,000 in August to 5.7 million but remains higher than the level in February 2020 (5.0 million). These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the last 4 weeks or were unavailable to take a job. (See table A-1.)

I had a big argument with my friend who runs a small sales agency and complaining that he was not finding any sales people for minimum/commission wages. He was losing them to agencies that were paying a $15/hourly and was arguing with me that $15 was too much when you included commissions. SMH. Funny how "market rates" only work one way.

These shortages are clearly caused by Brexit! The British left told me! No, ah, wait...

Not having enough natural gas or computer chips is a global problem. Not having people to transport petrol to service stations or food to supermarkets is a local problem.

Independently of what the "left" or the "right" is telling you, It's not hard to understand that if you rely on foreign workers to do certain jobs and they leave, you'll have a (temporary?) problem.

From my point of view, anyone saying that brexit isn't to blame for any of the shortages is just as wrong as those who blame brexit for everything.

Yeah but what you are talking about is a nuanced viewpoint and those are out of vogue.

I mean this comment is just silly.

A problem can have more than one cause.

The rest of Europe is dealing with the pandemic, we are dealing with the pandemic and brexit.

Newly created accounts should have a few hours waiting period before they can interact, to avoid impulsive shitposts like this one.

Are Americans issuing visas with crappy conditions hoping that the people they kicked out are coming back?

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