Paintmakers are running out of the color blue
bloombergquint.com
bloombergquint.com
(I have my own gripes about that website, like how it tries to prevent copy-pasting via JS, or that it links to arbitrary phrases that aren't common topics or other news articles like you'd expect. But at least it has more context about this situation.)
> To put things in perspective, an estimated 59% of the annual 1.1 lakh tonne of global supply of blue pigment comes from Gujarat (India's share is 82%).
> However, pigment manufacturers - small and large - in the state have been forced to reduce production by 25-50% due to the surge in prices of raw materials, their unavailability and working capital issues.
> Rising energy costs - coal and crude - have pushed up prices of raw materials such as phthalic anhydride, cuprous chloride and urea. These are used to manufacture CPC Blue (Copper phthalocyanine blue) crude, a key ingredient of pigment blue, which in turn goes into the making of various shades of blue paints.
Discussion from 9 months ago on HN about the new blue (top comment was interesting on pigment pricing): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25807199
Chemical formula for phthalo blue is C32 H16 Cu N8 Of these, everything is super cheap and only Cu (Copper) really has any substantial cost. 1 kg of Copper (15.7 moles) is $10. 1 kg of hydrocarbons (~9 moles, Octane) is...about $0.48 at a US gas pump.
Chemical formula for YInMn blue is (loosely) Y In0.8 Mn0.2 O3 Of these, everything is super expensive and only the "O" (oxygen) is relatively cheap. 1 kg of Indium (8.7 moles) is over $600.
Doing some dimensional analysis with additional hidden molecular weights, you can make 1 kg (1.75 moles) of phthalo blue with less than $1-2 of raw materials. Currently the price of raw phthalo blue pigment is about $6 in bulk, so we can assume that processing costs about $4-5 per kg (65-80%), and the $1-2 of raw materials makes up 20-35%.
However, just the indium in 1kg (4.17 moles) of YInMn blue will cost you $275.
Now, this is twice as many moles vs phthalo blue so assuming (bad assumption) that you need roughly the same number of pigment molecules for visual perception you could get the equivalent "deepness" as 1kg of phthalo blue with half the weight of pigment ($140). But even if your Yttrium and Manganese were completely free, and processing cost you $0.00 per kilogram....you'd still be 10 times what the price of phthalo blue is in the current shortage!
Yttrium is $34/kg btw, so you'll need about $12 of this to make 1kg of YInMn. Manganese is $2/kg and you'll only need about $0.10 of manganese to make 1kg of YInMn.
The only exceptions is war machines (guns, ships...) - you need to have that in your country just in case. Though the more trade you do with others the more nobody wants war with you because they lose both the goods you make and the market for goods you buy from them.
There's open war, cold war, hegemon bullying, and lots of other conflicts. Look at how much China tried to sabotage the Australian economy this last year (and vice versa of course) even though China NEEDED Australian coal and resources for their industry. Political considerations in the short run has priorities, even if it's economically costly.
Besides, with more capital it's going to lead into cheaper manufacturing with automatization in higher labor countries. Sometimes it's better to have redundant factories in many different parts of the world. Even if it's only for innovation.
You may not sell as many with more expensive local manufacturing prices but the goods will be of a much higher quality and so more expensive.
If you can make guns and ships but not fuel for the ships and food for the people carrying the guns and manning the ships, how far does that get you?
If you can make guns and ships domestically, but rely on a foreign power that might become hostile for the raw material, how far does that get you?
If you take the “war materiel must be domestically producable for security” position, and think it through, you will find that it is by no means a narrow exception.
> Though the more trade you do with others the more nobody wants war with you because they lose both the goods you make and the market for goods you buy from them.
The idea that no one ever wants to go to war with a major trade partner is...hard to align with history.
For comparison, the Great Financial Crisis still looms over us so much that people still anticipate another huge housing burst. And when companies like Ford announce that they aren't using FICO scores to determine if a person qualifies for a loan, people on websites start fearmongering about another sub prime lending crisis.
The virus, the treatment are transformational. They are the catalysts to technocratic governance.
A coworker gave me a graphics card, too!
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/xls/pswrgvwall.xls
Adjusted for inflation that's about $5.15/gallon.
I don’t even really like working from home(been remote since 2018) so when I want to go into the office I take the train into the city.
Some countries have had absolutely disastrous bouts of covid this past year (like Vietnam) and it screwed up supply chains a lot. Companies canceling orders because of expected drop in demand that didn’t happen are all rushing to put those orders back in, and it turned into a mess. There are plenty of factors at work here because each country that contributes to the chain had some different sort of problem.
Meanwhile it's month 18 in USA because the antivax folks started with the premise of non-cooperation ("because I hate the other party") and worked from there to invent all sorts of excuses why their non-cooperation is justified, so the government, who needs to care for all, including the beligerent, have to keep policies to keep everyone somewhat protected, ie masks, distancing, and proof of vaccination checks. Compare that to Portugal with 98% vaccination rate and no more vaccine proof checks required.
Yeah yeah you can still get the virus if you're vaxed, but it'll then be just like a bad flu, actually fulfilling the mistaken belief that many deniers had in the beginning...
The scientific literature says the vaccinated have lower viral load and are less infectious, if the load on hospitals and careworkers get reduced, what would prevent the relaxation of the restrictions?
Currently careworkers have been under extra pressure for 18 months, imagine a car engine being revved too hard and too long that suddenly blows, and apply this analogy to them, obviously not the entire industry in a day, but maybe over a semester...
It appears that is not necessarily the case[1]:
> In July 2021, following multiple large public events in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts, town, 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents who had traveled to the town during July 3–17; 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients. Cycle threshold values were similar among specimens from patients who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.
Certainly, the experience in Israel and the debate in the UK at the moment over more lockdowns would indicate that even very high levels of immunity (from either vaccination or infection) do not necessarily correspond with an easing of restrictions.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
I wonder how many more would've been sick without the vaccine. There were 469 cases, but how many showed up to those events?
Reading the study further, 4 vaxed people (and 1 unvaxed) were hospitalized and there were 0 deaths. I'd say a great result for the vaccine, but to be objective we'd have to see how it'd be different with the same set of people (same health status, etc) but without the vaccine.
I think/hope the goal isn't the eradication of the virus or its spread, but rather reducing the number of hospitalizations. The virus will probably stay with us, but if hospitals are no longer overwhelmed (since people aren't getting very sick and dying) then the governments will probably drop restrictions. Although mask mandates for some places like hospitals or old people's homes will probably remain for a long time...
They were using a measure called Ct cutoff, which (if used that way) is a crude measure of viral load, as the CDC points out in its own literature[1]:
> Since Ct values can vary based on many factors, it is not a good indicator of how infectious a person is or how much virus is present in a person (known as viral load).
However, it also points out in the sentence prior:
> It is still unknown how much virus is needed to transmit the virus from person-to-person and cause new infections.
What no longer needs to be ascertained is how this data has been interpreted by the experts, which is that the vaccines do not confer much, if any, advantage against transmission. There was the hope before the vaccines came out that they might but it was pointed out repeatedly that it would be unlikely given the nature of coronaviruses, and that has come to be the case.
> if hospitals are no longer overwhelmed (since people aren't getting very sick and dying) then the governments will probably drop restrictions
I hate to repeat myself, but the examples of Israel and the UK should also remind you that it is mere hope you are expressing, not anything borne out by experience. I hope you are right but my experience of people and how loathe they are to relinquish power - especially people who seek it, like politicians - tempers that somewhat.
[1] https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/health/documents/cedep/nov...
That would mean on average an infected person would infect less than one person and thus after a short while we converge on a zero infected population; as an infected person you either get well and unlikely to get infected again or die.
Vaccines work probabilistically and at scale. You need everyone to get the vaccine. If you have pockets of "inoculation" and give enough space to the virus to evolve through retransmission or too long to live, well tough luck.
This is the tool we have. And historically pandemics destroyed us. Not sure what we hope for here.
Very unlikely. 2020 was beginning of a super crisis caused by several reasons:
1) Depletion of fossil fuels which are used to produce consumer goods, e.g. to heat factories and provide electricity for the factory machines. Also fossil fuels are used to transport produced goods around half of the world. It was all possible due to abundant and cheap energy. But that energy source is no longer there.
2) Inability of capitalist economy to grow more. Capitalist economy must constantly expand to new markets but there're no more new markets as amount of markets on planet Earth is finite. Last huge market was created by destroying USSR and USSR industry: it postponed the super crisis by 30 years by giving capitalist system more space to expand to. But there's no longer any place for further expansion.
All will be going downhill from now on. Also, rising economic problems will prompt governments to start wars to exterminate "superfluous" population that cannot be fed in the new dark ages. There're other reasons for new war also. If you capture the country with still remaining fossil fuel resources and exterminate its population, you'll have more time to prepare for the inevitable.
Isn’t cause 2 basically agreeing “it was the pandemic”?
We're almost there. E.g. in Russia all new oil deposits found in recent years are in polar areas where extracting is difficult and expensive.
2. It is amazing how beginning of the super crisis coincided with the pandemia. I remember that in the beginning of the 2019 I said to several of my friends that huge crisis will hit the world at the end of the year. But I couldn't even imagine what would happen in the beginning of 2020.
Anyway, governments would want to get rid of extra mouths, especially young people with lots of energy but no way to put it into something productive.
It's especially clear when you start noticing that NATO forces are concentrating near Russian borders and amount of NATO military exercises on Russian borders has increased several times.
Russia has a big population and huge amounts of mineral resources. If NATO manages to capture Russian territory and exterminate most of the population in the process, it would give maybe 10-50 more years for Europe to adapt (e.g. build thermonuclear or some viable green energy sources), because currently Russia uses much of oil and gas and other resources for its own consumption.
There're other countries that could be the next potential targets. Two birds with one stone: turn young people who can't find a place in life into war into cannon fodder and potentially capture resources to extend the agony of the over-consuming economy.
The US is already doing this. The wars of extermination on the middle East are motivated by the desire to control the sources of oil, and when people react they're labeled as terror threats and eliminated. It is also not a new phenomenon, as it was already practiced to control the whole of north America and Australia in the past.
I don't think you're necessarily right this is temporary. But companies always have the option of just not producing. If no one has blue paint, for most uses, the consumer just buys another color and grumbles.
And the things that are most likely to have a shortage would be those things that are cheapest produce a large scale in just one part of the world, so they're things that would be hardest to replace.
Consider that when nations go to war, they will bomb the hell out of each other's industries. So if they are willing to risk that when they go to war, why would the loss of mutual trade be enough of a threat to avert war? I don't see how the cost is increased between a bombed out factory that used to trade with you, and a bombed out factor that traded with someone else.
Similarly in wars, nations embargo each other and sink each other's shipping, so again not sure why loss of mutual trade makes the cost of war unacceptable, if this higher cost is already acceptable?
This reminds me of the Olympic games that were founded at the end of the 19th C in order to promote peace among nations. The theory was that if nations could compete on the field, they wouldn't compete in war. I think that theory turned out to be as robust as the trade-makes-peace theory, which itself did not fare well in WW1.
At the same time, the EU has created an enormous amount of resentment and animosity between nations, as Italy and Greece are forced to adopt the same currency as Germany, which hurts their economies but subsidizes the German economy. The Germans, in turn, feel resentful for bailing out the South (by buying up so many assets in the South), apparently not realizing that purchasing all these assets is what allows the trade imbalances to continue. If anything we know that these types of asymmetric cross border capital flows are highly destabilizing, and do not promote peace at all.
My guess is what keeps Europe from going to war is that it remains under the US sphere of influence, at least militarily, and so the irritations and rivalries created by the EU do not spill out into war. Basically the domestic populations hate each other much more, but the states themselves are too crippled to act with much autonomy, and so they don't really have the agency to even start a war. They are just left seething, as their capital stock is sold off to their neighbors, but there is nothing they can do about it. This will not end well.
It would seem absurd for me as a French person (now living in Portugal) to want to bomb Germany for some economics reason, given that I have worked and befriended with dozens of very nice Germans. I could say the same of any European country. I’m not even special and I have friends and ex colleagues in virtually every EU country, from Greece, Poland, Sweden to Ireland Italy, Portugal and others.
It would be kinda funny if blue things became a sign of wealth because of this.
So it's worth pointing out that Tyrian Purple was an exceptionally long lasting dye; it did not fade when left in the sun, or after washing. Compared to other purple fabrics, Tyrian Purple fabrics always looked brand new, and I suspect that this is the real origin of their high-status associations.
Thank you for that. That's a wonderful bit of trivia.
People have been doing terrible environmental damage to indulge themselves for eons. We aren't exactly the brightest bulb in the box about some things.
I like that it wasn't enough for it to be rare (which it was) and laborious to produce (which it was), but also that it had unusual and very practical properties.
It seems as if today, mainly due to marketing, luxury goods get away with just being rare (even if artificially), or just being laborious to produce (e.g. the old (false) notion that "a Rolls Royce is completely hand-made").
But we were talking about regal purple, which I'm fairly certain was an outcome of Roman sumptuary laws. Eventually only the emperor could wear it. Yes, Tyrian purple predates the Romans, but it was merely a luxury good rather than a symbol of empire.
Any idea of the possible tint which is being referred to? Wondering if it's a mineral source requiring mining, heavy-metal processing, or what?
[0] https://m.timesofindia.com/city/ahmedabad/gujarats-bolt-from...
No doubt there are supply chain issues. Apparently there are journalism integrity issues as well. Yeah, it feels innoscent. But lazy and journalism are two words that do not belong together. Ever.
>After the earthquake, automakers worldwide were forced to stop making cars of certain colors because they couldn't get the aluminum-flaked Xirallic pigment that makes the paint sparkle. Merck was making the pigment at only one plant worldwide -- its Onahama plant in the quake zone -- and kept significant stocks of the product only at the same factory. It took months to restart the plant and resume deliveries.[1]
The Verge did a really good profile of the perils of just-in-time manufacturing in respect to Apple that highlights how highly efficient JIT in reducing costs but that it ultimately leads to more fragile supply chains.[2]
>Just-in-time manufacturing is highly efficient, but it’s not resilient.This style of manufacturing cuts costs — but it also means that if the supply chain is disrupted, there will be shortages.[2]
I really like this insight
>To make a more resilient system, a lot of companies may have to rethink just-in-time manufacturing. Resilience doesn’t show up as clearly on balance sheets as cost reduction, but it’s crucial for surviving disruptive events. Lowering costs by creating economies of scale and volume looks good most of the time, but once there’s a failure, companies don’t have many options.[2]
[1]https://www.autonews.com/article/20130715/OEM10/307159926/pi... (Paywalled) Archive: https://archive.md/Yoqe2
[2]https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21177024/apple-just-in-ti...
I'm not even sure I'd want that as a consumer. Mostly I'd rather wait than pay more (although obviously not for food).
If anyone has any experience, how do you feel it compares to the real deal?
I really felt like I was in that brick studio with a nicer set of equipment than I'd ever used. I guess I used easels sort of like that in college, but in the real world I didn't use such a formal setup.
The realism and sense of presence made me notice the missing haptic feedback and the lack of smell feedback (linseed oil, turpentine, etc), but the audio feedback and the physics are really great.
My experience was with Vive Pro 2 and Valve knuckles.
Strangely, the original story ran on Bloomberg itself, which isn't mentioned in the article. Fortunately, the archive.md trick works. https://archive.md
Oops, can't do that, it appears.
/irony off
While well intentioned, the problem is that it all relies on assumptions, largely tied to demand. And when demand goes through a wild whipsaw, and everyone takes diverging viewpoints of the shape of that whipsaw curve, the highly interdependent chain snaps.
Labor is an issue for sure. But make no mistake, the "restart from COVID" supply chain conundrum owes a lot of its pain to optimizing everything to the hilt, then reacting slowly as the world around us changed.
The amount of crap that we consume is astounding. And in many cases, each specific type of crap requires a bunch of smaller crap (components).
There is literally no way for a consumption-driven society as broad and deep as ours to stockpile years' worth of everything.
Basically my view is that it's this over reactiveness and obsession with free cash flow has swung so far so as to create a too-painful jam.
I would agree that over consumption is a problem, albeit a separate one to the conversation at hand.
Cheers.
This actually isn't true to the extent you seem to think it is, though.
> Basically my view is that it's this over reactiveness and obsession with free cash flow has swung so far so as to create a too-painful jam.
But that's not the only cause of the supply chain situation. Transportation is also a big part of the issue. Even if you had 10 years' worth of widgets in a warehouse in China, if you can't get them on a ship, or the shipping costs are too high, you get supply shortages where the customers need those widgets.
Also, to the extent that small vessels are used in the "transportation" business, it's for contraband, not Beanie Babies. Look up the street value of 100 kilos (~220 pounds) of cocaine in major US and European cities and compare it to the value of a 40 foot container full of nuts and bolts.
Like, suppose you could make $X in profit that is highly resilient to infrequent disruption or twice that with the understanding that every 20 years or so, you're going to have a few bad years because of black swan events. You might determine that you're willing to take your lumps during the chaotic times.
You'd get the same outcome by hiring someone and telling them they get a bonus proportional to increased profits, and no bonus in bad years.
There are a million possible black swan events and there's a million ways to plan for them.
1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex.
4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port.
5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.
The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it's getting worse not better every day that goes by.
I'd be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government if asked. Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point.
They're not currently in use at truck yards because it's illegal to stack containers high, but if it were no longer illegal then they could be quickly and temporarily set up.
Ted Ogawa, President and CEO of Toyota North America (https://pressroom.toyota.com/biographies/tetsuo-ogawa/):
> After joining Toyota in 1984....
Mark Templin, President and CEO of Toyota Financial Services(https://pressroom.toyota.com/biographies/mark-templin/):
> Since joining Toyota Motor Sales (TMS) in 1990, Templin has held a number of positions.
Chris Nielsen, Executive Vice President, Product Support & Chief Quality Officer (https://pressroom.toyota.com/biographies/chris-nielsen/):
> Nielsen joined Toyota in 1987 as a buyer at its Georgetown, Kentucky, plant
Toshio Niimi, Executive Vice President, Production Engineering and Manufacturing (https://pressroom.toyota.com/biographies/toshio-niimi/):
> Niimi joined TMC in 1984 and has held positions in the company’s engineering and manufacturing divisions.
Takeshi Uchiyamada, Chairman of the Board of Directors (https://global.toyota/en/company/profile/executives/board-of...):
> Takeshi Uchiyamada was born on August 17, 1946. He graduated from Nagoya University with a degree in applied physics in March 1969, and joined Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in April the same year.
Shigeru Hayakawa, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors (https://global.toyota/en/company/profile/executives/board-of...):
> Shigeru Hayakawa was born on September 15, 1953. He graduated from the University of Tokyo with a bachelor's degree in economics in March 1977, and joined Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in April of the same year.
Akio Toyoda, President (https://global.toyota/en/company/profile/executives/board-of...):
> He joined Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in April 1984.
(He also happens to be the grandson of the founder of Toyota.)
Koji Kobayashi, Member of the Board of Directors (https://global.toyota/en/company/profile/executives/board-of...):
> He graduated from Shiga University with a bachelor's degree in economics in March 1972, and joined Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in April of the same year.
I can see how that would discourage short-term decision-making.
So even if the government were okay with "market adjustments" on basic goods, there would still be this risk of stores getting looted/destroyed because people are so angry at how quickly prices increased.
Businesses are much less emotional. Most are just going to adapt to the new price.
Instead of talking about "inflation", talk about "cost uncertainty". That should make clear how a complex society with long production chains can't really deal with it. That also includes households, who have much less capability for planning than firms and really need to know what their bills will be and how much things will cost when making decisions.
https://www.academia.edu/43768978/NOTES_ON_COSTS_AND_CONSEQU...
It doesn't, though.
> If you are a business, you need to make long term production plans, and when you have no idea what the costs will be, that severly disrupts the production process
Sure, but that's the effect or unpredictable price changes, not inflation. USD is inflationary, Bitcoin is deflationary, but future (short or long term) prices of other goods and services in USD have a lot less uncertainty than those in Bitcoin. Inflation is not at all the same thing as difficulty projecting future prices.
Price gouging is a legal term for people/retailers taking advantage of shortages or spikes in demand by charging well over market price for basic necessities.
Allowing price gouging is allowing selling at the current market price.
While Toyota might have popularized the concept, it seems odd to blame them for the common-sense idea of just-in-time.
It’s quite natural, normal humans also don’t hoard everything they can possibly think of needing, nor should companies. It’s eco-friendly to be JIT as it leads to less wastage; while optimizing for rare shortages will result in wastage all the time.
For most of human history we did exactly that. The deeply interconnected "JIT Consumption" world is really quite new. And if consumption patterns suddenly change then you can't buy toilet paper anymore.
Before the modern epoch it was really rare to personally stockpile goods due to the extreme possibilities of spoilage (everyone loves weevils and moths right?) - that's only been an option in the near history.
The great lie of Civ is to present this as centrally organized when for most of human history this power was very finely decentralized due to the expense of communication and logistics. But as socities become more centralized food stockpiles haven't disappeared. Many governments still maintain food stockpiles, especially poorer countries.
In the beginning of the pandemic the agency was heavily in local news when they started deliveries of protective gear from their stockpiles - but to be honest, some rubber bands of the stored masks did need replacing.
Necessity leads to JIT, only in times of surplus can you even try to hoard. Famines were common before, and still occur now - you just don’t notice now thanks to globalization and in part, essential reserves maintained by governments and companies.
Neccesity leads to JIT, but also sustained surplus. If the winters are mild and food can grow year round, why bother stockpiling? If any widget can be obtained quickly and cheaply, why spend the extra effort to maintain inventory? If I can always buy ground beef at Walmart, why should I keep a winter's worth supply in my freezer? These practices are fine as long as the underlying assumptions remain valid. If one suddenly finds that they can't reliably buy toilet paper on demand, there is an incentive to hoard it. And that's exactly what happened.
[1] While it has taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent times, the early meaning of the word was 'to store and preserve for future use.' https://www.etymonline.com/word/hoard
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44687105
[3] https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nchfp/factsheets/food_pre...
We agree that humans were not able to hoard (ever, despite changing definitions) at the level we actually currently do. But, obviously, we don’t hoard enough to meet incredibly rare supply chain shortages like these.
It seems to me like we are at a well optimized level; do you feel otherwise, and if so, how do you plan to solve it without resource wastage and price increases?
I reject your constraints. Optimizing for minimum resource wastage and price is also optimizing for minimim reslience to the unexpected. If you want to experience this first hand try living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'd rather pay more and consume less while relying on more resilient systems; I think we need it now more than ever.
I don’t understand how you can have these statements side by side… Price increases by hoarding will affect the poor the most.
We are just now living through an era where a relatively minor shock is going to have severe implications last several years (which have and will continue to hit the poorest the hardest). This is what happens when you allocate resources too tightly without sufficient slack.
Most languages probably have quite a few.
As a native Russian speaker, I always understood "голубой" as a light shade of "синий" (blue), and that's how it's defined in dictionaries [1,2].
[1] https://academic.ru/searchall.php?SWord=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D...
[2] https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B...
(Be sure to read the #2 answer, which I find more compelling than the first.)